The Misadventures of P.B. Winterbottom is a grossly entertaining and unique platform puzzler/action adventure. Set in a world straight out an Edward Gorey painting, your job is to guide a creepy little pie thief in search of the elusive Chronoberry Pie. The core game mechanic allows you to record your character and his actions at any point for as long as you wish. This allows you create clones of P.B. that you then use to interact with the environment to help you reach the goal of each level.
The awesome thing about this is you can interact with the clones themselves. So say for example, that there is a ledge you need to get to but is too high for P.B. to reach. You can record yourself jumping up, then jump on the head of your clone, and use the momentum gained from his jump to help you up to the ledge. Or you can just stack a bunch of clones on top of one and other and use them as a ladder.
The goal for each level varies from stage to stage but usually involves you figuring out how to interact with the environment so you can get all the pies on the screen. P.B.'s actions are limited to jumping and using his umbrella to glide in the air and hit switches and his clones. Hitting a clone results in him arching through the air, useful for reaching higher platforms and snagging floating pies. The clones are also able to perform all these actions on themselves, as well as you. This allows you to set up your clones in planned sequences to navigate obstacles, activate switches and buttons, jump on seesaws, hit other clones and recover pies.
There are so many attractive qualities about P.B. Winterbottom. It's a shame that right it's now only available on XBL for the 360, because this game has iPhone and Wii written all over it. Hopefully Take-Two Interactive sees the potential and ports the game out to other platforms. The full game features seventy-five levels of increasingly sinister difficulty. With a wonderfully inspired art style and soundtrack, unique game play, and the ability to solve puzzles in a variety of different ways that opens the game to a high level of re playability, this game is highly recommend.
