Pid Review

Kurt does have an assortment of additional tools and weaponry with which to navigate the world or destroy baddies, including various bombs, launchers, and the like. Coupled with the beams, it’s a more robust arsenal than those found in typical two-dimensional platformers. But I found myself lamenting Kurt’s inability to throw his beam orbs or bombs with anything other than a halfhearted toss - landing a shot on anything that isn't two feet in front of you is an exercise in frustration. Some enemies can be killed by tossing a beam orb into funnels on their bodies, but the orbs have a grating tendency to pass through them impotently. Late in the game you’re finally granted the ability to direct the beams with greater control, but it feels like a feature that was withheld needlessly. Kurt’s also a sitting duck when he’s stuck in one of his beams - his movement is hampered, and exiting the beam is an unwieldy endeavor, at best.

Items can be purchased at specific vending machines placed about the world, though if you’re like me, you typically won’t bother. You’re just as like to find the very item that you purchased ten paces past the machine, you can only hold a couple of any item at a time, and there’s a good chance you’ll die right after employing your new toy. Kurt pays for these items with stars, which serve as the de facto collectible and currency. Stars are fairly easy to accrue; in a pleasant touch, they’re pulled towards Kurt when he’s near. But without any pressing need to spend stars for anything, I always found myself with a sizeable cache of them. It’s a blessing and a curse: I only collected those that fell directly in my path, content to forego the harder-to-reach ones. There’s the benefit of more carefree traversal of levels (and you probably won’t be compelled to retrace your steps to collect any stars), but there’s also very little incentive to explore.

The latter’s a bit of a shame, because Pid’s levels are otherwise a joy to behold. They tread on familiar grounds (a house, a factory, a town), but each is rendered with layered details and pleasing depth of field effects. The world's inhabitants, a race of assorted tinker toy robots, vary in size from child's playthings to towering colossi, and the levels scale to accommodate them in playful, creative ways. Musty, claustrophobic crawl spaces give way to sweeping open-air environments (or open-vacuum, in the case of an outer space level). At one point, you hitch a ride on a set of pint-sized planets that float about like an infant’s mobile.

Kurt’s a sort of Alice in Wonderland character, scrambling across massive furniture and conversing with strange giants. It’s part-and-parcel of a children’s story vibe that extends across much of Pid’s narrative and presentation, from its whimsical conception through to its fairy tale finish. There’s even some interesting thematic stuff going on in the periphery about gravity and the relation of Kurt’s beams to the overarching plot. It’s gentle, beautiful stuff, like Harold and the Purple Crayon was put through an Instagram filter. That soft focus effect lends a pleasant warmth to the lighting, in particular. I'm not sure that I've ever felt cozier in a game than I have within Pid’s dollhouse attics. I imagine they smell of rich mahogany and many leather-bound books.

But cozy doesn't jive with hair-pulling difficulty, unfortunately. Pid seems to be try to mesmerize its players and punish them simultaneously, often in the very same scene. It’s an incongruity that’s perpetually unsettling. One can’t help but feel like the game would have been better off picking a side and sticking to it. Some might have opted to preserve Pid’s crushing difficulty, reinforcing it with more complementary surface treatments. I suspect I’d have had greater appreciation for a casual, more forgiving romp, something that works in tandem with Pid’s clever stylings and font of thematic material. Instead, the difficulty pulls me back to earth whenever I try to get swept up in Pid’s innocent dream of the cosmos. I’m stuck with a different sort of dream: the one where you’re being chased by something big and fast, but you’re only able to run away in slow-motion.