The Last Tinker: City of Colors is a Playstation 4 (previously on PC, Mac, and Linux) 3d platformer with a unique style all its own. Everything in the world is based upon papercraft and various other arts and crafts. With a colorful art style to stand out among the other games on the market, is The Last Tinker: City of Colors an artistic masterpiece, or should it have spent more time on the drawing board?
The Last Tinker opens with players taking control of Koru, a monkey-turned-outcast that just doesn’t fit into the tri-color theme of The City of Colors. Each of the three neighborhoods in the city are made up of red, blue, or green and don’t like to congregate with each other given their varying emotions and personalities.
As a colorless fog known as The Bleakness takes hold of The City of Colors, all that it touches becomes drained of its color and freezes in place. Only Koru can stand up against The Bleakness, and by gathering the power of the three central spirits of the city, only then can he fight back against The Bleakness.
The progression in The Last Tinker starts quite slow. After performing the summary tutorial and training segments, Koru was convinced to go join a race taking place during the city’s festival. Entrance to this race wasn’t free and had a rather modest price of 500 crystals (the currency you get for performing small tasks or breaking apart the town’s numerous crates and barrels). Helping out a farmer and training at a dojo only got me about halfway to this goal. For the next half hour, I wandered between two zones smashing every crate I could lay my hands on just to gather up the remaining sum of crystals. At least during this time I discovered that loading times aren’t too dreadfully long on the Playstation 4.
It wasn’t much longer after this leg race that The Bleakness struck and the easygoing start of the game transitioned into more of a hero’s journey kind of tale, with Koru slowly growing more and more powerful with each district he liberated and color spirit he set free. It was a tale I had seen many times before in games, but the colorful motif of The Last Tinker brought a different take on this classic trope.
