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I've got a real soft spot for the recent Planet of the Apes trilogy. A small part of it is how much fun it is to see some fairly serious science fiction in the cinema (though the less said about the climax of the series the better), and an even bigger part of it is just seeing Maurice's beautiful face. Maurice! You wonderful orangutan, you, with your screen-filling cheeks. So I've been keeping a keen eye on Planet of the Apes: Last Frontier, the debut game from Ealing-based studio The Imaginarium that's set in the same universe. This narrative adventure finally broke cover this August (missing the cinematic release of the last film of the trilogy, somewhat unfortunately), and it's as bold as this genre gets - doing away with direct control, it's a 2-3 hour adventure where your input is boiled down to making quick fire decisions that fuel either the dialogue or the action.
A game that can be completed in an evening that only requires the use of two buttons? That's sure to get a few people's backs up, but I like how it so brazenly strips everything back to the bare essentials. From the demo I saw a while back, The Imaginarium has nailed the human drama and performance capture - perhaps no surprise, given the studio was set up by, among others, Andy Serkis and film producer Jonathan Cavendish - and by stripping back direct control you actually feel more directly involved in the narrative itself. It's deceptively smart stuff.
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