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Rayman Origins

The resurgence of 2D platformers has led nearly every long-running franchise to return to its roots: New Super Mario Bros. Wii, Donkey Kong Country Returns, Sonic the Hedgehog 4 — all games which temporarily ditched their series’ modern trappings to give fans a throwback to the golden heyday, and all successful because they were returning to formulas proven to work.
   
Rayman Origins returns to its series’ roots not out of nostalgia but out of necessity. Despite being one of the defining series of platformers in the mid-to-late ’90s, the franchise has been floundering for the past decade, relying mostly on its Raving Rabbid minigame collection spin-offs to keep its name alive. What was once a series that influenced an entire genre became one in which you wave your Wii controller around like a buffoon.
   
What a fresh breath of air Rayman Origins is, then — a beautiful, painstakingly crafted 2D platformer which seems to have passion radiating out of every line of code that it’s made up of. Nothing here feels anything less than essential — though the game has been pared down to the minimum, it never feels slight or incomplete; instead, it’s just a perfect amalgamation of what has worked for the genre over the past 25 years.
   
The mechanics are kept simple solely for accessibility, so the game can build up dense and intricately designed levels around easy-to-get-into platforming action with which anyone will be instantly familiar. It may appear no different than any other side-scroller you’ve played, with each level seemingly consisting of a bunch of platforms arranged in a slightly different formation than the last, but each area is packed full of secret rooms to uncover and hundreds of collectibles to pick up. They’re also designed so intricately, each level will require multiple playthroughs to fully unlock everything in it. Not only that, the game supports four-player co-op, so each level has to remain open enough to allow for all of the calamity that comes along with that many people running around at the same time.
   
There’s an art to the level design — which makes sense, considering the game itself is art. The hand-drawn graphics are stunning, bright and vibrant and as beautifully animated as any cartoon you’ve seen. And the soundtrack — consisting of wonderfully strange songs composed with kazoos, ukeleles, didgeridoos and choirs of ridiculous pitch-modified voices — is as impressive as anything else in the game.
   
It’d be easy to write off Rayman Origins as a minor footnote, a game with no greater ambition than being a simplistic platformer, but that’d be doing a great disservice to the quality of work that has been put into it. This is as well-designed, as beautiful and as fun as any of the other top-tier games released this year.

Bits & Bytes
   
Xenoblade Chronicles — a critically acclaimed RPG for the Wii which has been out for months already in Europe and Japan — will finally be seeing the light of day in North America with an April 2012 release planned, making it likely to be one of the last big releases for the console.

Upcoming Releases
   
Dec. 20 — Star Wars: The Old Republic (PC).

   
Mel Stefaniuk is a writer who can tell the difference between Mario and Sonic.