Our journey north to meet the Gol, the Dark Eco Sage, has progressed to the Rock Village. However, we’ve encountered another stumbling block in the form of a boulder-hurling monster barring our path.
Fortunately for us, we have a solution to this problem. It just involves collecting a few more Power Cells.
Thumbnail provided by Sam Callahan.
Something that I miss from this era of platforming was the notion of temporary power-up effects. That’s not something we a whole lot of anymore. These days, most platformers grow the player’s kit as the game progresses, Zelda/Metroid-style, with new equipment and abilities.
It’s brave to have the entire move list available to the player at the start of the game, because often those new moves are used to not just evoke a sense of character progression. They serve the second purpose of adding variety, by giving players new activities and actions to perform over the course of regular gameplay.
Temporary power ups like the colored eco we have access to in Jak are a great middle ground to solve this problem. They allow the dev team to temporarily give us abilities we don’t normally have access to for a segment or set-piece where they would be useful, while allowing them to design other levels in the game without having to take them into account unless they want to.
Players get the variety they want, and the dev team gets to more tightly control the experience so that we see the best possible version of the game. It’s a good compromise that allows for the best of both worlds.
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