Flynn and Freckles from the team over at Rookie Hero Games is a charming 3D adventure game set in a colorful pirate world. Just looking at the screenshots you can see the heavy influence visually from the Monkey Island series and looking at video you can see a lot of Zelda in the mix.
There’s a lot to like about single player game 3D platformer, but the game never quite lives up to it visual styling. But let’s focus on the good right now, and for everything it does Flynn and Freckles nails the big picture. There’s been a lot of care taken to build this world and everything fits well together.
So often you get these Unity games filled with stock assets or bits of bobs from all over the place that they never mesh well. Thankfully, that isn’t the case here and Flynn and Freckles is a charming experience from beginning to end. It plays heavily on the old-school 90s style to good effect.
The setting is where the game shines and the levels all look great but layouts can be a little loose and disconnected. As the young pirate Flynn, you are on a quest to search for treasures on the island you land on all the while solving puzzles, dogging traps, and fighting baddies that stand between you and lots of gold.
As you progress through the levels you’ll also be tasked with collecting keys and idols to help open up news areas. Flynn and Freckles also has a nice assortment of secrets that reward players who love to explore every nook and cranny of any given stage.
And while this is a classic single-player affair, you are alone in your adventure. You have other pirate friends that you will run into as well as a silly set of NPC including skeletons looking like they were ripped right out of Money Island. All this makes for a pretty fun and casual 3D platformer.
Flynn and Freckles isn’t trying to push the genre forward or introduce new ideas, rather, it feels like the sort of game that the developers wanted to play when they were kids. I know if something like this came out during the early 3D era of the N64 and original PlayStation I would have had this on my Christmas list.
Controls are smooth and responsive and while there is combat it isn’t a major focal point. You can attack with your sword via a single button. The more you tap it the longer the pattern becomes until ending after three slashes. It’s not deep in any sense but it gets the job do as enemies attack with equally basic strikes.
You’ll also have to deal with a few pretty large bosses and these fights help to mix up the adventure and break up the item hunting. One thing I have to note is the pretty impressive musical score Flynn and Freckles has. I don’t know if this was specially written for the game or if the team got stock music, but each track fits well and goes a long way to setting the mood and tone of the game, even though they do repeat a lot.
Graphically, Flynn and Freckles is fine. It runs well enough and the world is fantastic to look at, but Flynn himself is a bit too generic looking for my taste. He feel a bit too similar to someone out of Monkey Island and I would have loved to see him with a more unique character model.
While on the move the animations for everything are solid. Flynn has a very cartoon way of running about and this works well in the scope of the casual and fun story. Again, Flynn and Freckles utterly nails the big picture when it comes to design, but where it falls flat is in the small stuff.
The thing a 3D platformer lives and dies by is in how it handles all that platforming. Flynn and Freckles does this well as a whole and mechanics wise, but it nearly ruins everything with character placement. A long time ago the people behind Super Mario 64 had some pretty wise words when it came to 3D platformers.
They noted that asking the player to try and pull of precision jumps simply wasn’t in the cards. In this regard Super Mario 64 gave you lots of space and provided the room to over, or undershoot, a target. Even today asking for a pin-point jump from a player is a dangerous matter.
But the biggest thing in getting all that jumping correct doesn’t come from the mechanics, it comes from your characters shadow. Characters cast shadows and in the early days these served a huge purpose and weren’t there just to look cool. Having a circular shadow under you meant you’d always have a visual marker when jumping.
This is what gives you the all the precision you need to tackle tricky jumps, especially when dealing with wonky cameras. Flynn and Freckles seems to not be aware of this as you don’t get a shadow marker making jumps far harder than they need to be. You never really know where you are going to land even when you think you do.
You do have a shadow, but like a realistic game it goes away when you jump, coming back in as you land. This means that by the time you see your shadow again it’s too late to make any changes. You are going to find that most of your deaths are from improper placement on jumps. And then there’s the fact that there’s no map our quest guide so getting lost is easy, leading to unnecessary stretches of boredom.
Then there’s the sound issues that plague the game. I know I said the music was solid, and it is, but the sound is far below the quality level it needs to be. There are multiple sound files that I swear are temporary files (I think one of the attack sounds is straight from Zelda) while others are such poor quality they pull you right out of the game.
Jumping gives you about three different sound that your character makes. These are mixed up but one of them is so low quality you’d think it was recorded by a Dollar Store microphone back in 1998. Maybe it’s not the sound file itself, but it certainly is the mixing at the very least. The audio mixing for sounds effects is simply bad. Again, hopefully a patch can address this down the road.
Then there are the random crashes and the few times that I fell through the world simply when walking about. Thankfully, the game uses a pretty fair save system so even if you fall from a bad jump, the game crashes, or you fall through the world you won’t be set too far back.
Nearly all the issues I have with Flynn and Freckles seem like fairly easy fixes that can be rolled out in a patch down the road, but that’s what just makes them so annoying. The game gets the big picture right on so many levels but misses or ignores the little details.
The difference between a good game and a great game usually isn’t anything major, more often than not it’s in the details, the small world-building bits and polish that a great game gets. Flynn and Freckles gets the big stuff right but when you start looking at the details you start seeing the cracks, many of which shouldn’t be there. These bugs and issues keep you from enjoying the experience, and you really want to enjoy the experience.
That said I did like a lot about Flynn and Freckles and it does have just enough charm for fans looking for that casual 3D platformer fix. We don’t get too many games like this on Steam and this one is just good enough to be worth your time if you can get it on sale, and since it’s only $12 during its launch week that’s just about right. Hopefully the developers can learn from this title as I’d really like to see more from them.
Finals Score:
2.5/5
Genre: Adventure, Casual, Indie
Developer: Rookie Hero Games
Publisher: Rookie Hero Games
Release Date: Sep 7, 2018
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