#sumo digital

It seems natural after playing Tearaway to check out what was happening with the Little Big Planet series at that time. Media Molecule had moved away from the series that they launched, and picking up the slack was another British studio, Sumo Digital, who had previously contributed to LBP2 and Vita's DLC expansions. Between the release of Tearaway on Vita in 2013 and PS4 in 2015, LBP3 came out as a cross-platform game on PS3 and PS4 in 2014, with backwards compatibility with cosmetics and expansions from both prior [console] instalments. But what new stuff does it bring to the table with a new developer at the helm?

Naturally it all starts as usual with some high-minded/whimsical blather about creativity narrated by Stephen Fry, before introducing Newton the lightbulb-headed inventor, voiced in an amusing touch by Fry's old comedy partner Hugh Laurie. Your Sackperson/thing, sometimes known reductively as Sackboy, is brought to another new planetoid where the imagination of its inhabitants had been monopolised by some vague evil bozos. Newton foolishly releases them and Sackkid must find the ancient heroes of Bunkum to lock them up again and free Newton from their possession, with the help of LBP2-style NPCs in various themed worlds.

It's been a while since I played LBP2, but it feels to me like Sumo Digital managed to pick up right where it left off. The story levels, all created with the same tools and assets available to players to make their own levels for upload (more on that in a bit...) make good use of the world aesthetics, the usual but still novel three-plane 2D platforming mechanics, and new gimmicks to give you a nice little campaign full of collectibles that expand your creative repertoire. Sure the platforming action can feel janky and at times buggy, but the series has always been like that! So it feels right at home among the Media Molecule games (and the two handheld games that they didn't make as well!).

The big new hook is the additional playable characters aka the three heroes you're recruiting. They're also sack-folk but in various shapes, with different abilities. The doglike Oddsock can run fast and wall jump, Toggle can freely swap between beefy bruiser and itty-bitty bounder which has a few physics implications, and the birdy Swoop can fly freely. The latter especially would break many levels, so their use is quite restricted to particular levels or sections that have been designed around them. I enjoyed dressing them up in their own costumes just as I did for my Sackguy, and they're fun to play around with especially as they're all mostly speedier than the default, but you don't actually spend a huge amount of time playing as them. There's even one level played in top-down 3D as an unrelated yeti character… it reminded me of Spyro 3 which introduced many new playable characters who all felt stretched a bit thin.

Your standard Sackthing isn't neglected in terms of new abilities either. Building on the powerup system that had been expanded in LBP2, you now unlock permanent tools that can be pulled out at any time when needed: a suck/blow gun, a torch, a teleporting orb shooter, the "hook hat" (which isn't too different from just grabbing an object on a rail), and my favourite by far, the jet boots that let you double jump/air dash. They at least are quite fun to use and almost make the whole complicated equipment system worthwhile!

Having access to DLC that I'd previously picked up through the years [luckily] made me realise that some of the new additions were building specifically on the DC Comics level pack that Tarsier Studios had made for LBP2 (and Supermassive's equivalent for LBP Vita). That mini-campaign had a hub space in the Watchtower, and here the worlds have large explorable hub zones from which you access levels, with their own collectibles which can be exchanged for cosmetics in a shop. That DLC also introduced walljump surfaces which have been reworked into Oddsock's playstyle, and a gliding cape that works exactly like Swoop's dive move. Just interesting to note that even these side content things have fed into main game developments.

Anyway, while the campaign introduces a lot of new stuff, none of it has much time to breathe. There's only three worlds in total plus the prologue, and each has just a handful of levels. The final world is the most blatant illustration of the amount of content that was cut during a potentially difficult development, breaking the pattern of "collect a marble in three levels to free the new character" by reducing it to two! The Journey Home level pack by Sumo themselves released a year after the game's release goes a little way to ameliorating this by adding a sizeable level for each of the new heroes while revisiting locations and characters from LBP 1 and 2… maybe they shouldn't have charged separately for it though, because the base game feels very light on content.

Now I must address an enormous issue I've been tiptoeing around. The postlaunch life of this game was fraught with problems, from malicious uploads to technical issues that led to the shutdown of servers for the PS3 version and eventually the PS4 version as well. As of April 2024, all user-made content was suddenly taken offline, literally millions of levels and a huge pillar of the series' identity and purpose snuffed out. In October Sony then completely delisted the game and the copious DLC content from all three instalments plus the racing spinoff from its digital storefront. Everything official and fanmade which had been carried forward all the way from the first game in 2008, all the content, all the creativity, all gone. It's an ignoble end for a series with so much legacy.