Mar 252022
Another game that caught my eye when I picked it up in a bundle is Toree 3D, a colorful 3D platformer with a low poly aesthetic.
You play as a duck trying to get back his stolen ice cream, but that’s not especially important. It’s just an excuse to get you platforming through 9 stages.
It’s a short, basic 3D platformer. You can walk, run, and jump (and double jump). Each level has a number of stars for you to collect on your way to the goal.
I was a little disappointed to see it didn’t have much exploration, since exploration-based 3D platformers are my favorite, but it’s fun enough for what it is. Each level is very short, roughly 5 minutes or less depending on how well you do. It times you, and gives you a rank at the end.
So all in all, it ends up being a short game, although there are two additional characters you can unlock. Its biggest appeal is probably to people who want to replay levels for faster times.
But there’s another odd layer to Toree 3D, and that’s its horror elements. Occasionally, the sound glitches out, the music gets distorted, the happy faces in the background turn creepy… it becomes a twisted version of itself, for no clear reason, before reverting back to its bright, colorful style.
I was hoping the horror elements were building up to something, but they weren’t, as far as I can tell. They’re just there.
It feels like the creepypasta version of a 3D platformer. You know, like somewhere out there would be normal copies of Toree 3D, but you got the one where weird stuff starts happening.
That’s an interesting style to intentionally emulate, although I still wish the game did more with it. While reading about it afterwards to see if I had missed something, I also came across the Super Mario 64 Iceberg and the personalization meme, which was so entertaining to read through, I wonder if any game has tried to more closely mimic that yet.
(Reading about that made me realize that something in Super Mario 64 scared me as a kid, and I feel as though I might have had a Super Mario 64 related nightmare within the past few years, which is… strange. This has also made me nostalgically want to revisit Super Mario 64.)
Anyway, Toree 3D was cute and short. I wish it had done more with its creepy elements, but it was fun to spend a little time with.
Wot scared you in SM64?
The piano?
No, I keep thinking it was when you’d stare up at the ceiling to get transported, but I’m not sure why that would have scared me unless I looked at it by mistake and didn’t know what was happening.
Here I wanted to write a bit about how you could’ve been Samantha Lienhard the freelance musician and gamer if not for your bad experience with the piano. But… no, you teleport from looking at the ceiling…?? (I don’t even… know what you’re talking about.)
Who needs a piano to be a musician? I played the clarinet in high school!
Okay, so what I was thinking of is when you get the wing cap for the first time, where there’s light shining down and you look up. It does not look quite like how I was imagining it. It’s possible that I was trying to remember something entirely different and just got it mixed up with that.
[…] earlier this year were three 3D platformers from the indie developer Siactro: Toree 3D, which we discussed in March, its sequel Toree 2, and Macbat […]