The Locoroco series is one of the most unique series of games that exists on the PSP. A game played solely using three buttons, it’s simple, yet compelling gameplay, and beautiful art style have made it a firm platform favourite.
The series’ first foray into the DLC market comes in the form of Midnight Carnival, a take on the challenges included in Locoroco 2, as opposed to the traditional completing of linear levels.
The basic story, though there isn’t much of one, sets Midnight Carnival at – surprisingly – midnight, when everything on the LocoRoco world has fallen asleep. The Bui Bui, the evil versions of the LocoRoco’s Mui Mui friends, have kidnapped the seven blobs and have thrown them into extremely challenging stages. It’s down to you to help the LocoRocos escape the different puzzles that the Bui Bui have placed in your way, collecting as many objects as you can in order to increase your score.
The new gameplay mechanic in Midnight Carnival is a new ability called Boings, which can be used to perform huge jumps or bounce from one area to another. By performing Boings, you can speed up your LocoRoco as well as create a combo, which adds all important points to your score and allows you to effectively move to different surfaces to get to new areas. The inclusion of the Boing is an fun element, and perhaps something that could be included in the next full game.
You’ll need to have amazing control of this technique to simply pass the stages within the game, with each one in the game being rated by the difficulty of obstacles that you’ll face. At first, thing seem simple, but soon the difficulty curve skyrockets, which can severely test any LocoRoco veteran’s patience. For example, there are some sections that require split-second Boings or you’ll instantly fall into a hole or onto a large strip of spikes, effectively destroying your blob. If you can’t put up with gaming frustration, then you should certainly avoid this game.
Midnight Carnival allows multiplayer matches with up to four players exploring a stage and trying to make their way to the end of the stage. Each person selects a LocoRoco and jumps in. However, there’s no way that you can specifically interact with the other players, making the multiplayer somewhat pointless. The other characters only pop up on your screen as a floating head, but they don’t affect your game just as you can’t affect theirs. Even the objects that you can collect in a level are immediately refilled, leading to there being very little point in playing the multiplayer over the single player.
As always, the graphics and sound are great, as is to be expected from a LocoRoco game, but that is only a small sweetener for the frustration of the game.
Whether you would enjoy this game comes down to two things. Firstly, are you a LocoRoco fan? If not, this game adds nothing to entice you to the series. Secondly, do you enjoy being frustrated, or trying to pass severe challenges? If so, you’ll enjoy this game, if not, steer clear. I am the latter, I don’t particularly enjoy extreme challenges. However, although this game isn’t for me, it could be a perfect game for others, so it’s each to their own.
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