Who doesn’t love being a little guy? I don’t know, maybe it’s a generational thing, but when I saw a game about 🅷a teeny tiny alien having a laser beam shoot-out with a stag beetle the size of a Panzer Maus under an 80-foot mushr𒁃oom, my inner child screamed, “Honey, I Shrunk !”
Infinitesimals, which had its reveal trailer showcased during the 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Summer Game Fest livestream, is an action-packed semi-open-world adventure about a spacefarer looking for a new planet for his people to call home - and that planet just so happens to be Earth, or at least, a few dozen yards in what appears to be the Eastern United States or Canada - the native habitat oℱf the aforementioned stag beetle.
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I got a chance to play around 30 minutes of Infinitesimals at last weekend’s Play Days event, and it ended up being one of my favorite games of the show. Great action, funny writing, and some pretty impressive effects showing off the power of 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Unreal Engine 5 really impressed me. But what really sold me on Infinitesimals, whether the devs realize it or not, is that it’s secretly a 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Buzz Lightyear game in disguise.
To Infinity, And Backyard
Captain Awkney Relinrake, commander of a coordinated and militarized alien s♈quadron, is exactly the kind of self-serious heroic leader you’d expect him to be with a name like that. He’s as direct with his words as he isꦰ with his rifle; a no-nonsense man’s man who just so happens to be the shape and size of a grasshopper.
This fact is lost on Relinrake, of course. From his perspective, he’s an explorer on a hostile alien planet, where feathered creatures as big as space stations soar through the air ℱlooking for their next meal. Maybe he wouldn’t be such a tough guy if he knew he was actually microscopic, but something tells me that probably wouldn’t phase him.
Even if I hadn’t mentioned it before, you probably would have made the connection to Buzz Lightyear by now. Like Relinrake, the vainglorious space ranger isn’t exactly known𝐆 for his sense of humor. They’re both unflappable tough guys, even though the world around them is filled with a colorful cast of wacky characters. Relinrake doesn’t know he’s small, just like Lightyear doesn’t know he’s a toy. He even has a support crew of diminutive little green men that practically worship him! All he’s missing is a rootin’ tootin’ lawman to tell him this planet ain’t big enough for the both of ‘em.
The similarities were clear to me - and evidently a few other people who played the game throughout the weekend - but not to the developers. Game director James McWilliams tells me the character is heavily inspired by Jean-Luc Picard from Star Trek, and that the Toy Story connection hadn’t even occurred to him until people started mentioning it at Play Days. Though they may🌌 not have seen it before, it’s something they can’t unsee now.
A Big Adventure On A Tiny Scale
I grew up playing games like Toy Story 2 on N64, Army Men: Sarge’s War on PS2, and the best Counter-Strike map of all time, de_rats, so I know a thing or two about being a little guy. What I wasn’t prepared for was how damn good this game would look. Epic is publishing Infinitesimals, and it's clearly a showcase of all the fancy nanite and lumen technology that makes relatively in༺expensive games look like a few hundred million bucks. Lighting and reflections make everything look natural and realistic, while the density of the environment, which turns a backyard into a wild jungle (with full collision on every single blade of grass) is awesome to explore. I’m in love with the dynamic particle effects that create raining sparks whenever y🐻ou shoot at the metallic robot enemies.
Infinitesimals evolved from a much more simulation-focused game, but a lot of the qualities still remain. You can see this in the ballistic system, which makes different materials react in different ways when you shoot them, and bullets ricochet off of surfaces realistically. If you shoot an enemy in the leg, they’ll fall over naturally based on their momentum and the mass of their body falling towards the destroyed limb. Ther꧙e is an attention to detail in the systems that seems even more impressive because of the scale. It’s just made to look small, but it’s hard to shake the feeling that there’s actually a full-sized world that exists outside of Relinrake’s adventure.
That adventure is something I just barely scratched the surface of in my short time with the game. Relinrake was expecting to find a colony of his own people when he arrived on the planet, but instea🧸d all he found were abandoned facilities and hostile robots who are, fortunately, just as bite-sized as he is. I got to explore outside a bit - a task made infinitely more enjoyable thanks to a jetpack that lets you zoom around the map - before tackling a fetch quest that took me to one of the abandoned alien facilities, and ending in a robot ambush.
Infinitesimals is high on my list of most-anticipated games thanks to its spectacular presentation, tight and satisfying action, and, not least of all, the fact that it was inspirꦓed - whether consciously or unconsciously - by my guy Buzz Lightyear.
