Armillo was one of the games I stopped to see at the Penny Arcade Expo just to be polite. Iâd never heard of the studio behind the game, Fuzzy Wuzzy Games. I wasnât in the mood for a cute, colorful platformer.
ButâŚthey roped me in. The guy handing out promo postcards for the game did his PAX job well and made eye contact. I couldnât brush him off. So I sat down to play Armillo, not mentioning where I was from. I ran the gameâs title character around a spherical world, dashed with one button, jumped with the other. I started thinking about Sonic controls and Super Mario Galaxy level design (Sonic Adventure 2 had spherical worlds before Galaxy, some Sega fan is yelling at me now). As I played, someone else behind me said they saw some Bomberman in this game, too. The whole thing felt like a throwback, even when Iâsurpriseâfound a machine gun for my armadillo to briefly use, twin-stick-shooter-style against enemies.
I had enough fun that, after a couple of minutes, I dropped the veil of anonymity. I told the Fuzzy Wuzzy guys I was from Kotaku and needed to show our readers the game. So we filmed it, with two of the developers explaining the action. You see a little bit of two levels of the game. What you donât see is a two-player mode which I ran out of time to check out.
The game is about six months from completion. Fuzzy Wuzzy hopes to put it out on Steam and Xbox Live Arcade, but it doesnât sound like theyâve found a publisher yet. I enjoyed what theyâve made so far. Is it weird to think of a colorful platformer that combines 3D Mario and Sonic games as a throwback already? Maybe. But letâs think of it as fun too. There is promise here, but still a lot to prove for a new studioâs debut game.
Enjoy the video above and keep tabs on the game through the developerâs official site
You can contact Stephen Totilo, the author of this post, at [email protected]. You can also find him on Twitter, Facebook, and lurking around our #tips page.
