It was the chicken that did it for me. Guacamelee’s intense brand of action/platforming was fine, but it was the dedicated button to turn into a chicken that sold me on its potential. I mean, in the demo presented, there wasn’t much incentive to turning into a chicken. Occasionally you could become a chicken, a mechanic which makes you smaller, to sneak in some hidden areas. There was also an sporadic appearance by giant chicken that functioned as a tutorial. But yeah, other that Guacamelee seemed to have a subtle obsession with chickens.
Luckily some guys from DrinkBox Studios were standing by and took the time to entertain my fascination in their featured poultry. Apparently, the chickens were a convenient asset that slowly got out of hand. The large one in particular was merely a place-holder until they could come up with something else, but it turns out that a giant freaking chicken is the best way to learn the rules of the road. I was also told that the chicken you can morph into could engage in combat before it was (probably wisely) considered too out of place in Guacamelee’s structure.
Ah yes, structure. After all, we are still talking about a game here. What I played of Guacamelee, completing what I assumed to be the entire demo, felt like the skin of a 2D platformer blended with a brawler and laced with insanity. As a luchador named Juan I had a handful of combo attacks, included a particularly useful launcher move. Of greater interest was Juan’s ability to shift, via the L and R buttons, between the world of the living and the dead. Obvious uses were to reveal platforms that exist in one world and are absent in the other, but it got a bit tricky when I was timing jumps between ledges and through walls in sequence with shifting between each world. A neat boss fight even featured two foes whom could only be damaged in their respective worlds.
Guacamelee is all that and a huge chicken. It’s also coming to both Vita and PlayStation Network sometime in early 2013, and I can’t wait to see what kind of weird stuff the folks at DrinkBox come up with when Guacamelee’s finished.
