The Many Pieces of Mr. Coo (2023) [PC] review

No mat­ter how much I try and hide this, bit by bit, I start to fall apart.

– Chuck Palahniuk

As someone raised in a family that loved the art of Salvador Dali and the stories of Alice in Wonderland, I enjoy surrealism. I love strange, unnatural, twisted landscapes where nothing makes sense and anything is possible. It’s a suitable setting for point-and-click adventures, where logic is often defied, yet it also makes sense. Anyone who has played old King’s Quest games knows you don’t eat the pie. You need to throw it at the yeti. The Many Pieces of Mr. Coo is the newest game to join the ranks of surreal point-and-click adventures, and it leans hard into the strange.

The Surreal Story of Mr. Coo

In surrealism, a simple story gains complexity by the grounding character’s interaction with the world, the characters, and themselves. The Many Pieces of Mr. Coo’s story is as simple as it can get: Mr. Coo would like to eat an apple. The apple, however, proves most elusive, taking him through strange backstages and mysterious worlds on his quest. As the title implies, along the course of this apple hunt, Mr. Coo ends up chopped into three pieces and separated from himself. This doesn’t exactly hinder him, though. Even as just a head, with the rest of him missing, you’re able to hop around and explore. Once you gather the other parts, more opens up to you. Legs can jump higher than a head, after all, but they’re not very good at grabbing levers.

Unlike other point-and-click adventures, Mr. Coo does not have an inventory system, likely due to him not having pockets. Or, often, a body. As such, the gameplay revolves primarily around finding the next step in the routine. What can you click on and in what order will that clicking make something happen? Like other point-and-clicks, sometimes the order makes sense, sometimes it doesn’t. For the first half of the game, it’s generally simple to figure out what to do with a little observation. The second half begins to fall a bit more into the absurdist logic you often get with point-and-clicks.

Eventually, there’s even timing puzzles, where not only do you have to figure out what to do and what order to do it in, you also have to do it before the game reaches a state where you can’t. Failure results in a rewind and another go. No Game Over screen, so you can try as many times as you need. However, with the limited amount of time available, you may be rewatching cutscenes several times.

A Statement From the Creator

With all that in mind, how is the game? It’s got high highs and unfortunately, low lows. The art is wonderful, a vivid and unique world filled with strange creatures and things and blending real objects with cartoonish art in a wonderfully absurd setting. The story, like Mr. Coo’s missing body parts, feels incomplete. Based on the comments from Mr. Coo’s creator, Nacho Rodriguez, that’s because it is.

Statement by Nacho Rodríguez, author of The Many Pieces of Mr Coo#MrCoo #indiedev pic.twitter.com/KWmTnMzv4p

— The Many Pieces of Mr.Coo (@mistercoo_game) September 12, 2023

On September 12th, less than a week after the game’s release, Mr. Rodriguez released a statement stating that the game had been released without his consent in a condition that left him disappointed. He had turned to Gammera Nest to handle the programming and porting to consoles while he completed the story, art and animation. His unhappiness stemmed not just from numerous bugs, he said, but also missing content, which explains a great deal about the abruptness of the end of the game. While the Gammera Nest team has been hard at work fixing reported bugs, there’s not much to be done for a game released in an incomplete state.

There are also strange choices in logic, not only in the point-and-click elements, which is to be expected, but in general. For example, after completing the game, you can replay it to unlock art pieces for each scene. However, there is no way to view this art after the three second initial glimpse. There is no gallery to present them for second looks. Mr. Rodriguez put time into creating the art. Someone at Gammera Nest put time into programming it into the game. No one made an attempt to let you look at it. It also ends with a “to be continued” somewhat abruptly, which I personally am never fond of.

Final Verdict

With how short The Many Pieces of Mr. Coo is (about an hour and a half blind, half an hour if you know what you’re doing), knowing that elements are missing, and being able to feel that missing portion, it’s hard to recommend as it is. I wish we could have gotten to see Mr. Rodriguez’s full vision for the game. We may yet with time. As it is now, though, Mr. Coo’s video game debut needs some more time in the oven. What we have now is, without question, a decent game. It could be better, though, and I think everyone involved knows it. At the very least, wait until the content is fixed. More recommended, wait until the entire game is released, so you’re not trapped by that To Be Continued.

BROKEN PIXEL

Maggie Maxwell spends most of her days buried in her fiction writing, only coming up for air to dive into the escapism of video games, cartoons, or movies. She can usually be found on Twitter as @wanderingquille and @MaxNChachi or streaming on Twitch with her husband, also as MaxNChachi.