Tiny Hands Adventure

My first thought booting up Tiny Hands Adventure was simple and genuine: someone out there really, deeply loves the 90s mascot platformer era, and they wanted to build a shrine to it. Borti, a cheerful blue T-rex from Dinoburg, cannot play soccer properly because of his famously useless arms, so he cuts a deal with a fairy called Lady Florella - collect crystal shards across her worlds and she will sort him out with proper tools. It is a thin premise, and it knows it. The writing never pretends otherwise, which is honestly fine for a game pitched at younger players taking their first steps in 3D platforming. The level design is where the studio's affection for the genre becomes genuinely visible. The 20 stages are connected through a Banjo-Kazooie-style hub tower, and each one shifts perspective and camera angle to evoke a different classic. One minute Borti is running toward the screen while a boulder chases him, straight out of Crash's first world. The next he is navigating a top-down maze, then a flat 2D comic-book stage, then something approximating a Ratchet and Clank space jaunt. The soundtrack shifts with each world too, jumping from driving rock to poppy electronica to something that sounds like alien dubstep, and it is one of the game's quiet strengths - varied, upbeat, and easy to live with. Borti's move set grows as you progress: collect the orange gem from four stages in a world to unlock the Guardian boss, beat the boss, and Lady Florella hands over a new tool - drills, mechanical arms, and similar upgrades that can be taken back to earlier levels to reach previously gated collectibles. Here is where the warmth runs up against real problems. Borti is one-hit-kill fragile, which sits awkwardly with a game aimed at kids. The camera is fixed and auto-controlled, and it frequently puts you blind - enemies approach from just off-screen, platforms look reachable and are not, and several deaths will feel genuinely unfair rather than earned. The spin attack and jump hitboxes are loose in the wrong direction: contact that looks solid sometimes goes straight through an enemy, while a jump that looks safe sends Borti off the edge. Boss fights carry extra sting because getting hit resets the entire three-phase encounter regardless of how many lives you brought in. Reviewers across the board flagged these same issues at launch, and there is no evidence the PC version has been significantly patched since 2018. Who is this actually for? Seasoned platformer players will clock the roughly two-hour runtime, notice the borrowed ideas, and probably feel the itch to just reinstall Crash instead. But for a parent playing alongside a seven-year-old, or for someone who genuinely has never touched a 3D platformer and wants a short, colourful, low-stakes introduction, there is a scrappy sweetness here that is hard to fully dismiss. The gem-hunting adds a light layer of replay if completing worlds on hard mode sounds appealing, and the unlockable skins give younger players something to chase. The heart of Blue Sunset Games is visible in every level theme switch and every soundtrack cue. It just needed more time in the oven to match that heart with tighter controls and a camera that does not actively work against the player.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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