Tweet
All the Princess can do is dance, but while she dances she is untouchable. Tap X and she launches into a grand jeté, toes scissoring the air in a mesmerising reinvention of a ubiquitous video game action. Hit square to make her pirouette, or do it while running to execute a sinuous forward flip. Hold right trigger and the character twists, kicks, springs into a breathtaking extended bravura - an astonishing, fully motion-captured piece of contemporary ballet that had me laughing in delight the first time I beheld it in action. Such insistent style and grace in a medium where most character animations are cursory, subordinate to the needs of balancing or efficiency. Not that these more involved displays are without a mechanical purpose. As arms undulate and ankles fly, ribbons snake from the ether to entwine the Princess's limbs and encase her performance in a defensive sphere - repelling or taming the paper arrows and geysers of clotted red tissue that trouble Bound's dreamy landscape. Her dance is a kind of catharsis, the transfiguration of deeply nursed anxiety into something beautiful and bewitching.
Bound is not, in fact, the Princess's story. It's the story of a woman in a blue dress we first encounter stepping onto a beach. In the course of the game's brief span - one to two hours or so, plus unlockable speedruns and a photo mode that lets you play around with effects and filters - she paces down the beach towards a house, pausing every few steps to gaze out over the waves and study a page from the sketchbook in her hands.
Read more…
More...