A pleasant look at the barfing of SPRay

The word “SPRay” is technically a shorter way to refer to the main character “Spirited King Ray,” but we like to refer to it affectionately as “The Barfing Game.” In addition to having a hero’s standard sword, two floating spirits named Gush and Liad follow Ray through this kid-centric action-puzzler. Each spirit has its own set of liquids that can be used to coat every surface in the game with green sticky goo, slippery ice, cleansing water or just standard brown barf (and probably some other varieties we haven’t seen). Even though Gush and Liad are tiny, they can spray more than enough liquid to coat an entire town. And if they do, everything will stay slimed until cleaned with water (even after the game is turned off).

Of course, what good is a town to slime without a villain to rescue it from? Queen Mordak is an evil woman who’s infected the game’s six areas with her evil, anti-matter spreading boulders. As long as the boulders exist, they steadily produce this malevolent substance, which coats the world and spawns enemies of several varieties, and anti-matter, generally, sucks.

Many of your enemies are made of anti-matter and can be destroyed by hosing them down with your twin spirits. Standard soldiers can be hosed off with about anything, but the tougher versions wear armor, which protects them from standard barf blasts. You might try using green goo to slow them down, and then have Ray knock off their cantankerous clothing with his sword before finishing them off with Liad’s water blast. Anti-matter throwing soldiers create a different challenge. Even if they miss, the shot will create an anti-matter splotch, which tends to spawn more soldiers until you wash it off.

Fighting is only part of SPRay, getting though the game also involves solving puzzles (with barf). Many of the puzzles have to do with coating surfaces with the correct goo (noticing a recurring game mechanic yet?). Sliming a moving panel and sticking yourself to it to get to a new location, or using ice to make a sliding leap over a large precipice are two examples of the kinds of things you’ll do.

So, yes, there are puzzles and fighting in SPRay, which is good. More importantly, there are two adorable little guys spewing up a thousand times their own body masses in liquid. We’re not quite sold on stopping Queen Mordak, but we’re certainly going to use Gush to paint the starting world brown. And it will be awesome. We’ll let you know how the brownening goes towards the end of October, when SPRay comes out.

Sep 5, 2008