Little Trip: Origin Review

Little Trip: Origin is pleasantness personified. It’s nearly impossible to feel anything negative while playing this game. But while feeling good sure it great, sometimes a game has to provide a little more. Little Trip: Origin gives you what you want, but not necessarily all that you need.

But first let’s start with what Little Trip: Origin does so right. After all, as soon as they launch the game players are assaulted by how cheery the whole thing is. Impossibly happy and peppy acoustic music banishes bad feelings with the power of sunshine. Colorful minimal graphics give personalities to dots as they explode into starbursts in an ocean of white space. It creates so much positivity it would almost be better as a motivational screensaver - or as a more cynical option, the design for a prescription drug ad.

However, Little Trip: Origin decided to be a game, so we must judge it as such. Players control a dot of their own and try to steer it into other dots for points. The catch is they can only move the dot forward or upward, keeping true to the game’s “never look back” spirit. This limited movement leads to a lot of near-misses as players attempt to line themselves up with targets. But with more chances always a few seconds away, even in the perhaps overly empty world, it’s never frustrating. And successfully wrangling the system into narrowly avoiding deadly grey pinwheels always satisfies.

Unfortunately, there’s just not enough really going on in Little Trip: Origin to make it more than a quick way to start smiling. The dot-collecting process becomes rote over time, more enemies and faster movement make the game more cluttered than difficult, and power-ups like a dot magnet and a bigger player dot for nabbing targets more easily don’t really shake up the core gameplay. Structure would be antithetical to the game’s free-form, casual tranquility, but more progression would help.

Still, it’s impossible to ever stay mad at Little Trip: Origin. Go with its pleasant flow for as long as you feel like it, and move on when the time is right.