In 2001, artist Nathan Jurevicius created Scarygirl, the little girl whose friends would populate an online comic, an award winning graphic novel, a line of vinyl collectible figures, and most recently a video game. Square Enix released Scarygirl on the Xbox Live Arcade and the PlayStation Network as a downloadable title last month, and it’s every bit as endearingly weird as fans of Jurevicius could hope.
In order to fully appreciate the strangeness of Scarygirl, you need to know her backstory. Scarygirl was abandoned at a young age, just a lonely little girl with a tentacle for an arm and a penchant for dressing like a pirate with a wizard hat. A kindly but no less bizarre octopus named Blister takes pity on Scarygirl and takes her under his tentacle to teach her the ways of the world. During their many and varied adventures, the girl also befriends a seemingly mystical rabbit named Bunniguru. Gifted with animal friends and a ramshackle house Blister built for her, Scarygirl nevertheless is plagued by nightmares of a mysterious man with a beard. The game begins with our young heroine setting out to find out who this bearded fellow is and why he’s showing up in her dreams.
Being a tie-in to the Scarygirl line of art and collectibles, it stands to reason that Scarygirl’s visual style would be unique. It shouldn’t come as a surprise that the art is the most outstanding part of the game. The characters and environments all carry Jurevicius’s trademark cartoonish look with lots of stark colors and defined geometry. The denizens of the Scarygirl game world look like they beamed in directly from the vinyl figure collection. The overall style is decidedly of the “so creepy it’s cute” school, and fans of Tim Burton’s claymation productions should feel right at home.
Scarygirl is a 2D platformer that rotates the world with you, allowing for some interaction with the third dimension despite the game’s overall adherence to classic 2D stylings. Scarygirl traverses her environment by running and jumping per usual, but she can whip her tentacle arm around to make herself glide helicopter-style for brief jaunts through the air. She also employs her tentacle arm as a weapon, using it to bash and whip the many enemy creatures that cross her path. The villains include such horrors as cute and colorful hedgehogs, determinedly angry mountain goats, and dive bombing owls. In addition to slapping her enemies silly, Scarygirl also can use her tentacle arm to grab stunned bad guys and then either throw them or use them as a weapon to bash other enemies.
As she proceeds through the world, Scarygirl collects fish, which restore her health, and gems, which serve as currency to pay for unlockables and upgrades. The upgrades fall into several categories, including ability upgrades and new gadgets she can attach to her tentacle arm. The gadgets allow for new combat and traversal possibilities, while the abilities add to her arsenal of tricks. An early upgrade, for example, allows Scarygirl to grab a bad guy with her tentacle and then to squeeze him until he pops, rewarding her with another health-refilling fish or two.
The game is unquestionably cute, and seeing what crazy and weirdly adorable thing is around the next turn is the driving force behind the gameplay. Scarygirl begins at a sedate pace and gradually ramps up the difficulty, but about midway through the game suddenly becomes significantly more challenging. This wouldn’t be as big a negative issue if it were not for some floatiness in the controls that leads to inevitable and dumb deaths. There are more than a few ledges in the game from which Scarygirl gleefully plunged, just because her running animation made her continue forward long after I had attempted to stop her on the edge of the precipice. In this way, the game lacks precision at times, and that leads to some unfortunate frustration.
Despite the frustration factor, Scarygirl provides some fun and cute 2D platforming. The collectibles will keep completists busy, while one or two brutally difficult achievements might stymie achievement and trophy hunters. Gamers who already are fans of Scarygirl and the other artistic creations of Nathan Jurevicius undoubtedly will get the most out of this game as they get to interact with the artists’ creations in his trippy and lovable world.
