1. Pinstripe plays as a platformer but it has the soul of an old point and click adventure game. Sure you have to run and hop about the but the focus on puzzles and story make it feels a lot more like The Day of the Tentacle than Super Mario Brothers.
2. Really, there isn't a strong focus on gameplay at all. The player's interaction w/ the world serves more to provide a connection to it than it does to bring excitement or challenge.
3. Something about Pinstripe strikes me as the kind of game you might show to your friends who haven't played a video game in twenty years to show them that games are something reasonable for adults to do in their free time. Or, it would be, but nobody reading this has any friends.
4. The setup is you play as Ted, a former minister. You are traveling w/ your daughter, Bo, who is kidnapped early on by the titular Pinstripe who whisks her off to hell and promises to become her father. As you might expect, you are on a mission to get your daughter back from this point on.
5. Pinstripe borrows heavily from creepy cute vibe of The Nightmare Before Christmas, which seems to be about as influential on indie games development as Super Metroid is.
6. Moment to moment, you spend pretty much of your time just wandering about. This is fine. The world is interesting and believable enough that just finding new stuff is its own reward. Every corner has new creepy cute things to find and it all holds together very well.
7. Well, there is one section of backtracking that feels like padding and it wears a bit thin at that point.
8. The puzzle solving is mostly just "Can't go this way? Go the other way until you find a thing and then come back." It sounds superficial on paper but its purpose is more to give the player just a little something to hang on to as Pinstripe draws you into its world.
9. This also gets to why this feels a lot like an old adventure game. There is this collect-absolutely-everything-and-keep-it-until-you-need-it feeling. There's also a bit of looking on the back of items in your inventory to find various codes and combinations to progress the story. I dunno... I don't get paid to explain this stuff. This makes it feel like an adventure game to me.
10. There's also not much challenge to the platforming either. It's just how you get around. There was exactly one part that was hard at all.
11. As the story goes, it pretty much develops just how you might expect. Or, actually, it doesn't develop. Pinstripe remains an evil guy that kidnaps your daughter. The place he takes her to continues to be hell. Her situation gets no more or less precarious as the game rolls on. Thing is: it's all still fun and interesting. You don't really progress in this game except in the sense you literally get closer to finding your daughter but you are constantly learning more and more about the world that is presented to you.
12. I am terrible at writing video game reviews so it's not obvious from what I've written so far that I really enjoyed Pinstripe.
It is one of those games where you can feel a real connection w/ the
developer, like they are sitting there and telling you a story.
13. Case in point: there is a new game+ mode and I actually wanted to play it immediately after finishing my first playthrough.
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