Daily Little Big Planet 2: sackboy and the deathly habitrail

This is mainly going to be about gushing, because I really love today’s level, Refuse Ridge. I don’t care much for the theme of the level, which is the idea that your sackboy has landed in a dump, thrown away with a bunch of other toys and license plates. A sad toy race car with a creepy blinking eye tells you to escape by making your way to the puzzle horse. I thought this was a great start, even though it took me about a thousand tries to get a snapshot of that car with his creepy eye open. It was like he could anticipate whenever I would hit the start button, or maybe hitting the button caused him to blink. I don’t know, at any rate the trashed toys theme really doesn’t go anywhere meaningful. No matter, because the playing of the level itself is just great.

Part of it is this nifty Habitrail sensibility where tubes carry you from place to place and can launch you unexpectedly into danger with the use of hidden jump pads. I wonder how my childhood hamsters would have felt about that. Added to this element is the way the grappling hook is used in this level, as a tool for slowing down and avoiding as well as swinging. I loved that twist. Even the regular swinging had a different feel in this level. It called to mind Indy using his whip, or my fantasies of being Indy using his whip to get out of jams. The above picture shows my sackboy, having been thrown by swinging under a rising platform, in mid-air over an electrified column just before I grapple hook to the next platform which will rocket me up to a much higher area. That’s a thoroughly clunky way of describing a moment when I should just have used one word: exhilarating.

I played this level several times and I cannot recommend it highly enough. Now, you’ll have to indulge me with one more picture, because taking it took me forever.

After the jump, creepy eye