Rayman Origins

Rayman Origins marks Michel Ancel's return to the 2D platforming that made the original Rayman a phenomenon. After years away on Beyond Good & Evil and the Raving Rabbids, Ancel and the UBIart Montpellier team brought the limbless hero back in a hand-painted side-scroller built specifically to feel like the kind of platformer fans had been waiting fifteen years to play again.

The story is light. The Glade of Dreams is overrun by 'nefurrious' Darktoons, the Fairy Council invokes Rayman to save it, and Rayman teams up with his best friend Globox and the two crafty wizard Teensies for a journey across the world's most hilarious heroic team-up. The plot is mostly an excuse to put the player in over a hundred characters and twelve unique environments, each lovingly rendered by reputed video game artists and animators.

Gameplay is dense platforming with elements of action, adventure and beat-'em-up sprinkled in. Up to four players can play simultaneously in drop-in/drop-out co-op as Rayman, Globox or one of the two Teensies. Over sixty levels of 2D platforming hide secrets and alternate paths that unlock as you progressively gain new abilities — swimming, diving, the surprising HairlyCopter — and reward returning to earlier stages.

Boss fights are the visual showpieces. Giant pink monsters with hundreds of eyes. Possessed mountainous golems. Evil daisy-meets-carnivorous plant hybrids. Each one is built around a specific puzzle of patterns and timing, and the visual design rivals anything else in the side-scrolling genre. The UBIart Framework engine — designed in-house specifically to let small teams produce this quality of art and gameplay — is what made the project economically possible, and it shows.