The Misadventures of PB Winterbottom

Not every game allows you to play as a top-hatted 1920s pie thief. Oddly enough, The Misadventures of PB Winterbottom is the only one we have seen.

It's a fairly straightforward puzzle platformer with a couple of neat touches borrowed from the most interesting puzzle game of the last few years, Braid. In that game, the player could play tricks with time, to remarkably clever effect.

PB Winterbottom can instead create clones of himself – you press the shift key to start recording, and then run around the level - a clone will be created that does exactly the same thing until he gets killed or knocked off course.

The aim of the game is to feed Winterbottom's enormous appetite for pies by collecting them level by level.

The visuals are very impressive: the game's style means that most things are in shades of grey, but if anything that enhances the experience. The backdrops of cities and clocks are very well drawn and the overall style, which owes more than a little to Edward Gorey, is endearing.

The text of the game (there are no vocals) is written in a pastiche of Gorey's and Edward Lear's styles, which occasionally jars – it's not perfect, but is usually well done. Sound is also good and the ongoing catchy piano theme works very well.

The clone mechanism saves PB Winterbottom from being just another puzzle game and gives it extra longevity, as well as allowing for some fiendishly difficult levels – once you finally complete these, they will fulfil the "why didn't I think of that earlier?" factor.

It’s been available for the Xbox for a little while, but the PC conversion is new.

Either way, there is enough here for a few hours’ entertainment and it’s certainly worth the £4 cost.