There’s a noticeable lack of colorful euphoria in the modern platforming scene. Halcyon days of exploring lively landscapes and talking to mush-mouthed creatures were too blissfully 90’s to survive into our late-aught dirge of Super Meat Boy, Braid, and Limbo. Those afformentioned titles, as much as I love them, lack a literal dimension synonymous with the wackadoodle antics of Banjo Kazooie, Super Mario 64, and Jak and Daxter: The Precursor Legacy. The Last Tinker: City of Colors aims to fill that void. Beautiful, vibrant, and offering a considerably large 3D world, The Last Tinker certainly looks the part. Playing it, as you’ll come to discover, requires further consideration.
The Last Tinker’s premise is simple and effective. Colortown, formerly a harmonious society, has been monochromatically separated into three distinct areas. The green potion is a land of fear and paranoia. Blue is overwhelmed with regret and sadness. Red is an antagonistic bastion of rage. The marketplace, a smaller stretch off to the side, is the last refuge those who wish to live in a blended society. Further conflict arrives when an antagonistic, personified-bleakness begins to drain Colortown’s sacred hues. The titular last Tinker, Kuro, is charged with the task of allying the divergent sects of Colortown and fighting away the bleakness.
Charm is packed tightly into The Last Tinker but it withholds any saccharine edges from bursting out of its sides. There’s a difference between creating mindless content for children and crafting a story equally digestible by learned adults, and it’s a line The Last Tinker walks with surprising grace. Whether The Last Tinker is viewed as an allegory of modern race relations or a kid-friendly, “we all need to work together” adventure is left to the mind of the player. In either case it never feels cornered enough to speak down to its audience, relying instead on sight and audio gags for laughs and universal, emotive themes for its story. Seeing a ship captain weep with fear of failing his late father speaks as loudly as hilarious scream unleashed upon repeatedly blowing up an anthropomorphic mushroom character (don’t worry, he’s fine). The story The Last Tinker tells is as old as time, but it’s conveyed well in newer medium.
This is the closest The Last Tinker gets to running with its peers. It borrows here and there from their particular quirks – gibberish noises replacing spoken dialogue, a myriad of styles packed inside a cohesive package, a literally colorful cast of characters – but the final product is all creation all its own. Its world and narrative belong with games of generations past. Despite the aid of time and the relative ease of developing modern software in Unity, The Last Tinker plays less like a contender and more like a flyweight swinging absently at everything coming his way. Where do we begin?
Movement, the accepted backbone of any platformer, is a fine place to start. Kuro’s footfall is audibly unremarkable and mechanically vacant; he doesn’t as much walk as he glides over everything he touches. The absence of an accompanying jump button is amended through parkour-inspired mechanics; move Kuro close to a ledge while holding the run button and watch as he effortlessly leaps from edge to edge. Running, jumping, and general navigation all blend together in a homogeneous, mushy movement. This doesn’t necessarily remove challenge from the equation, there are still countless feats of timing to conquer, but it does remove an otherwise personal connection from the player. You don’t control Kuro as much as guide him, which leave Kuro feeling more like an anonymous entity than a genuine character.
Combat is another area where The Last Tinker falls short. Taking inspiration from Arkham Asylum, its rhythm-based engagement seem like a good fit for a mechanically simple game. Kuro is blessed with a simple combo and a dodge move, leaving some advanced maneuvers to earn later. Eventually he can tag an enemy green to force them to retreat in the opposite direction, and use another button to turn them blue and leave them in place. Thematically it works well, the cowardly green runs the other way while the melancholy blue freezes in places, but it doesn’t exactly make for satisfying combat. Dealing with a few ranged enemies and taking out the occasional color-shifting big bad are nice for a change of pace, but generally combat does little more than eat away time. It’s not bad, per say, just noticeably less inspired and fun than the games The Last Tinker aches to emulate.
The remainder of The Last Tinker is a manic collection of worn ideas. One-off sequence where Kuro has to fight a giant kraken or accurately conduct a color orchestra are contextually interesting, but composed of interactive ideas exhausted decades ago. Likewise, light escort missions that require Kuro to work with his delightful mushroom friend are equal parts hilarious and oddly heartfelt, but not that much fun to play. Outside of a few mindless fetch quests, very little of The Last Tinker’s content is a genuine miss, but the bulk of it is too forgettable to feel anything other than auxiliary. It exists to support a payoff that never quite arrives.
The Last Tinker is struggle to judge fairly, especially given the precious context under which most of it operates. A game like this didn’t need an eclectic soundtrack fit to narrate secret agent evading security as quickly as it is to support a gloomy, noir-inspired detective sequence. Likewise, the smart use of pre-baked effects like fog, depth of field, minor particle quirks, and other parlor tricks pull The Last Tinker out of any suspected budget-game funk. It does all of these amazing things with relative ease, but it’s merely pedestrian in its interactivity. Kuro’s actions won’t be able to hold the attention of a more seasoned player.
Perspective also plays an important role in enjoying The Last Tinker. In the hands of a cultured player The Last Tinker may seem like a retread, albeit a cheerful one, through tired ideas. In front of a younger player, or maybe a lapsed gamer in search of 90’s-era goodness, The Last Tinker fares much better. In another light, as the first game from a small team formerly focused on mobile development, The Last Tinker seems like one hell of an accomplishment. It calls to mind Okabu, a delightful, kid-friendly game from a primarily mobile development team. Boundless charm isn’t enough to correct its stumbles, but a heart of gold makes it easier to set them aside.
