Nostalgia gone wild: retro platformer Snip & Chu will make you miss being a kid

We actually missed this at Casual Connect, but thanks to heavenly intervention, still managed to get a final glimpse of Snip & Chu via another indie developer’s iPad. And yes, call it what you want, but we feel it was fate that we managed to learn about this game. Because it’s pretty amazing.

Winner of the most innovative game award at this year’s Asian Indie Prize, Snip & Chu is a retro platforming adventure by Australia-based Clicker Interactive. Snip is a discarded toenail and Chu is a piece of gum, and when Snip gets kidnapped, it’s up to Chu to save him, in the craziest possible way: by jumping through the Wasteworld, presented to the player in retro Game & Watch style.

(See: These are your Asian Indie Prize 2014 winners. Go Asia!)

To be fair, most of Asia never got actual Game & Watch handhelds; you’re probably more familiar with something like this:

Clicker Interactive’s Shaun Britton said that designing an experience is important to the company. “We made each game look like a plastic handheld, by generating the game-housing as a 3D graphic, and made the LCD screen by matching the original colors of the clear screen plastic.” He added that the games back then used calculator technology to display LCD characters over a printed plastic background, so “a good visual representation of that is important”.

And in an extra burst of nostalgia, do you remember how when you pressed on the handheld’s screen or tilted it, how the LCD images would come into sight? Your iOS device, when running Snip & Chu, does that too.

Britton said that his company used “the iPad’s gyroscope sensor to detect what position the tablet is in, to change a shadow’s position, or add a graphic when a certain position is reached.” Other nostalgia-inducing effects include sprites flashing on the screen at the start of each game and a background shadow that moves with the position of the table. Players can also use an iCade 8-Bitty controller for a maximum blast to the past.

Checking Snip & Chu out at the end of Casual Connect immediately made me want to go back to my childhood, when games were simple and fun. And to Clicker Interactive, that’s exactly what they’re going for.

“When we see someone enjoy a particular effect in our game, which looks like an effect in the original 1980s LCD titles, we know we’ve succeeded in designing a nostalgic moment for that player,” Britton said.