Finding a New Little Big Adventure

Little Big Adventure Promo Screenshot. Taken from MobyGames.

A very good friend of mine kind of introduced me to Little Big Adventure, and recommended me to play it after I expressed my interest in two game since they just seem pretty comfy. Even though my game list keeps growing as I go through more titles I either got recently or hold off for a long time, this series is still one of those few I want to visit at some point. I enjoyed reviewing the current status of multiple older games & franchises, so I would like to keep doing that. This time, by recapping the latest developments in Twinsen's story.

Current Status.

That's another great story where an old series got back into the hands of its original creators... At first I thought that getting at the bottom of this would be hard enough, but recently Didier Chanfray, one of the co-founders of Adeline Software, recapped the story pretty well: the rights stayed with liquidated Delphine Software, from who he managed to acquire the intellectual property back. Which is the sole reason why we got re-releases on GOG & Enhanced Edition of the first game from DotEmu.

In the beginning of last year, Twinsen's return was announced by newly formed company [2:21] with not only Didier, but Frédérick Raynal on board as well. Their intend is to bring the series into modern days while keeping a good line of communication with the community. At first they teased Little Big Adventure 3: The Genesis of the Stellar Entity, and gathered fan's feedback about desired features and talked about their engine of choice. Then they released the source code of both original games' engine and tools, which is always a good thing.

Due to larger popularity of Little Big Planet, [2:21] decided to change the name of the series to Twinsen's Little Big Adventure. That reminds me of Homeworld: Cataclysm and its unfortunate situation with Blizzard. At the same time, the team discussed their intention to expand the franchise and creation of Little Big Adventure 3 seemed more strange. Ultimately, they decided to reboot the franchise. I guess there're good reasons why they decided against creating spin-off titles or new series that would've taken place before or after Twinsen's: I'm not familiar with the games, so that's not for me to judge. If anything, that's better than going for a remake, which is a lazier version of a reboot nowadays.

The abandonment of mobile port of the first game is kind of sad though. I understood that it wasn't a success and nobody maintained, but as a dork that likes to see older games being ran on Android, that's still kind of sad.

Bright Future.

With the source code of both Little Big Adventure & Little Big Adventure 2 released under General Public Licence, it was a matter of time when community projects started to appear. That will improve the support of the original game on ScummVM with sequel's support being just a matter of time. I was actually surprised to see how this tight & niche community seems just so... united. To a point where all of their current projects are hosted by a singular GitHub account. That's pretty refreshing after being a witness of fragmented state of Warcraft 3 for a few years.

Out of all things that's available from there, I would like to highlight LBA2 Remake. It a recreation of Little Big Adventure 2 written in JavaScript that debutted back in 2020. This project has come a long way since then, and you can check it out for yourself through browser: keep in mind that this demo might become unavailable at some point after this article gets released. As of its goals is to support various platforms in the future, I suppose I shouldn't worry about the current absence of original game's port. It's just a matter of time before someone decised to pursue such endeavor... Wait, I forgot that ScummVM is available on Android.