Gibbon: Beyond the Trees
Might contain spoilers.
A short, well-made, concise game with a soothing æsthetic and pleasant music. It’s clever to always
have the player character moving to the right, in proper side-scroller fashion, and it’s impressive
that the entire story is told this way. The environment is unfortunately a bit hard to read, so to
speak, due to the lack of visual separation between its interactive and non-interactive parts.
Liberation
mode is a little confusing since there’s no way to swing backwards towards an
animal one missed, but I eventually realized the path is a circular one, providing as many
opportunities to free the animals as desired. That mode was a bit too repetitive to complete,
though.
It’s nice to have such simple controls and map them to multiple keys for ease of use. They lack responsiveness, however, leading to frequent accidental sequences of jumping, swinging, and releasing too early because it looked like the gibbon wasn’t going to swing in the first place. I wasn’t often able to establish a rhythm, but it was very enjoyable when I did. I had a few significant issues with my controller: the game once made the entire USB subsystem crash, forcing me to reboot.