Gamescom '13: Psychonauts-esque Vita platformer Stick It To The Man 'probably' coming to iOS
But Vita first, later this year
If you're a follower of this site you should be aware of Stick It To The Man, because we previewed it at E3 in June. It's a stylish, amusing, profoundly Psychonauts-esque side-scrolling platform-puzzler from Zoink, the studio that brought us the jolly good Swing King on iOS.
The setup is that you're a telepathic, telekinetic oddball called Ray. You can see into the heads of the other characters to discover what's preoccupying them, and then you can reach into these thought bubbles, pluck out the little pictures denoting the thoughts, and transplant them elsewhere, combine them with other items in the real world, or whatever.
One puzzle I saw during my brief hands-on at Gamescom involved reading the mind of a lunatic in an asylum to discover that she thought she was a spider. Naturally, this meant she was thinking about flies.
I reached into her mind and removed the fly before pasting it onto the face of the guard who was, in a more corporeal sense, preventing me from leaving my own cell in the asylum. The spider/lunatic did the rest.
Most of the puzzles similarly involve combining real and imagined objects. For instance, at one point you have to heat up a pot of tea using the fire from a pyromaniac's imagination.
The Psychonauts influence is unmistakeable, and the man from Zoink was happy to admit it. The game looks great, and while I didn't get to hear all that much dialogue during my brief session with it I'm told it was written in part by Adventure Time's Ryan North, which is encouraging.
Anyway, I won't go into too much detail because there's already a perfectly good preview on the site. The extra nugget of information I discovered at Gamescom is that Stick It To The Man is, in Zoink's words, “probably” coming to iOS in the future.
Probably isn't certainly, of course, but given Zoink's experience on the platform it seems like a fairly safe bet. If you are an iOS gamer you should be excited.
In any case, the PS3 and PS Vita versions will be available first, some time before the end of the year.
