It probably says a lot about The Many Pieces of Mr. Coo that, when I’ve shown it to different people, it’s triggered different reactions. Those reactions have all been positive, but there’s something about it that dredges up varied memories. My dad thought it looked like something that Dali would cook up, if he properly got into animation. My mum said it recalled old Pink Panther cartoons. Some friends thought it looked like Cuphead, while it made me want to re-read old Bone comics. Different people, different reactions.
One-man designer, artist and developer Nacho Rodríguez will tell you that it’s a very personal creation that, sure, tinkers with Eastern European animation and old rubber hose cartoons – the same that inspired Cuphead. But it comes from a place that is uniquely him. And having played through The Many Pieces of Mr. Coo it’s the adjective that best describes it. The Many Pieces of Mr. Coo is profoundly unique.
At first, it feels like an experimental cartoon that you can use as a toy. Mr. Coo waddles onto the screen in complete darkness, and you move your cursor around to tap away at the few things on the screen. The cursor helpfully changes shape to give an indication of what’s worth nudging about. The Many Pieces of Mr. Coo has a fine sense of how to introduce itself, as there’s no tutorial here. It just slowly adds more and more elements onto the screen until you’ve understood what’s needed from you.
It doesn’t take long to realise that the world and logic of The Many Pieces of Mr. Coo are skew-whiff. It might be best described as a point-and-click adventure in terms of genre, but – in almost all instances – you won’t know what will happen when you point and click something. Tapping on a bug-eyed lampshade causes the shades to switch out for different colours, until you realise that, cycling through them, that one of them matches some nearby toadstools. You can then convince a frog to jump from the toadstools to the lampshade, where it promptly gets eaten. Cue some bonkers consequences and a reset of the board, so there are more things to tinker with.
From that example you can hopefully sense how The Many Pieces of Mr. Coo works. While there’s no predicting what will happen when Mr Coo. touches something, there are patterns and connections that mean you’re not adrift in a surrealist soup. There are moments where the logic gets stretched – the final third of the game pushes it a little, requiring you to pull off multiple oddnesses at once – but generally, the world of The Many Pieces of Mr. Coo is consistent and logical, if not in a real-world sense.
And we can’t understate just how glorious those actions and reactions are. Nacho Rodríguez is an acutely talented creator, as Mr. Coo leaps and twirls with rubber hose glee, and the world contorts into some pretty fantastic shapes. It’s like being the conductor for an award-winning cartoon, as you twirl the baton and watch something else lollop around the screen.
Adding to the artistic appeal of The Many Pieces of Mr. Coo is Sara López, whose real-world models form the backgrounds for a couple of sequences. These are beautifully cluttered rooms that look like a messy collage on first arrival, but you soon start plotting out paths for Mr Coo. (or the many pieces of him, as he quickly gets chopped up into head, legs and torso) to climb over. If there’s something that draws the eye in her backgrounds, you can guarantee that it will have some application in the puzzle, so the two creators have clearly worked closely so that Mr Coo. can make sense.
These environments aren’t always wholly satisfying to interact with, though. Almost all of the flaws in The Many Pieces of Mr. Coo are technical, and this comes through in click-areas and bugs.
There’s a fair amount of cursor-scanning in The Many Pieces of Mr. Coo, as you hover around the screen looking for things that you can or can’t tinker with. But it’s not hugely generous with the size of its click areas, and this can leave you dismissing certain items as irrelevant when they very definitely aren’t. Again, particularly in the last act, we thought we’d exhausted a room, only to find that we hadn’t hovered over the exact pixel that needed hovering over.
It makes for a tricky double-bill with the bugs. For a game that isn’t much more than a couple of hours long, we found ourselves restarting more than we should. Our cursor would disappear, or an interaction simply wouldn’t trigger. In one instance, we were booted straight out of the game. This combines with the small click areas to leave you questioning the game: am I not able to distract the propeller-snake because I am not meant to, because I’m not clicking the right thing, or because there’s a bug? It’s often a toss up between the three, and that can make playing The Many Pieces of Mr. Coo a bit of an infuriating question mark.
We’re more pragmatic about the length of the game. As we mentioned, it’s only a couple of hours (or thirty minutes if you know what you’re doing), and that might make some people prickly. But how often do you play a game that is as rich and artfully constructed as The Many Pieces of Mr. Coo? It’s like walking past the Mona Lisa and complaining about how small it is.
So much care has been put into The Many Pieces of Mr. Coo that we suspect Nacho Rodríguez will circle back and address its bugs and technical hiccups. We hope he does, because this is a game that deserves to be flawless. The Many Pieces of Mr. Coo is a free-wheeling, surrealist graphic adventure that’s so beautiful that sometimes we just want to sit back and admire.
