With so many games out there catering to almost every desire, it’s to be expected that a few are going to come along and look to press some sensitive issues to get some quality storytelling out there. Point and Click games are great for storytelling thanks to the simplistic gameplay allowing for a focus on narrative whilst giving more involvement than a visual novel experience and with the latest game Little Kite from developer Anate Studio, a story woven into a point and click adventure is the exact experience you can hope to find. But is it any good?
The story of Little Kite focuses on a family who has already been through a lot. Central to this family is Mary, the mum, and Andrew the son, whilst his father – and Mary’s husband – died in a traffic collision. As time passed, Mary brought Oliver into the family, but after falling in love and remarrying, she soon found that there were some bad sides to Oliver, all of which were fuelled by his alcohol addiction, and even with little money to live off, Oliver would ensure alcohol was most important. With the alcohol came the abusive personality hidden within, and whilst Mary endured abuse and turned to pills to hide the pain, her son Andrew instead finds himself slipping further from reality into a fictional world in which his dead father lights his days and reminds him of a little kite they used to fly together and how to find it, which results in Andrew becoming missing and his mum desperate to find him and save them both from the abuse. Now of course there is a little more to it than that, but this is a game deserving of a playthrough so I won’t ruin any more of it here.
It’s a truly dark story, and you’ll be hard pushed to find much joy for the characters all that often as you work your way through, but this is one that is certainly compelling from start to finish throughout its 3-4 hour run time, with a strikingly believable tale unfolding into a true story of desperation.
The gameplay itself is as simple as using the right stick to move the cursor over items of interest, and the A button to interact which then moves your character to the item to interact with it, whilst Y will highlight all the spots of interest in an area in case you haven’t managed to figure them out for yourself, and all items that can be used to progress in the story will be stored within the inventory which is access by moving the cursor to the top of the screen. It’s all very basic but that’s all that’s needed for this adventure, as the story is what you’re playing for and keeping things simple ensures progress continues at a steady pace.
With these basics, it’s up to you to figure out what items you need to use and where you need to use them, who you’ll need to talk to and what information you’ll need to get from them and so on. There are multiple puzzles throughout the game with varying difficulty levels for each, but whilst trial and error will be necessary, common sense will certainly help you along too with nothing really proving unexpected in terms of solving a puzzle. That’s not to say some of them won’t have a challenge to them, but overall enough exploration and you should have everything needed to progress.
It should be noted that whilst the controls are certainly very simple, Little Kite is indeed an Xbox Play Anywhere title, and should you have a PC capable, it is definitely better to go with mouse and keyboard over controller here thanks to the incredible speed of the cursor at times. Whilst it’s manageable if you maintain small bursts of movement, it’s easy to overshoot your target if you try to rush things.
Next up is the visuals and Little Kite is certainly a game that boasts impressive visuals. Each story scene takes place via a comic-book style design. Whilst you won’t see fully animated visuals or a full cast of voice actors, the story still packs a powerful punch through near still images alone, not to mention the sudden sound of emotion through sobs or aggression that plays over a scene to set the dark and gloomy tone further. As for the environmental designs, each area within the game is full of detail and boasts an impressive look that really creates a fully realised world capable of selling the emotional points further courtesy of a well-chosen colour pallet and mood-setting hand-drawn locations.
In fact, the audio isn’t such a big part of the game, however, the noises included within story scenes are almost always perfectly timed and necessary. Besides these moments there is a piano soundtrack that tugs along in the background but it serves no purpose more than simply ensuring you aren’t playing silently until cut scenes occur.
Conclusion
Whilst Little Kite is certainly a worthwhile experience, it must be said that localisation isn’t a strong point with numerous grammatical issues including misspelt words and missing punctuation, but it certainly isn’t any reason not to jump into this fantastic story.
This game was reviewed based on Xbox One review code, using an Xbox Series S|X console. All of the opinions and insights here are subject to that version. Game provided by publisher.
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