Completely Stretchy Review - Swinging When You're Winning
As we all know, video games are a fantasy world. These can be a somewhat accurate facsimile of a real-world place, an idealised recreation of a place at a particular point in history, or it can be a completely made-up world inhabited by a wide assortment of strange and frankly baffling-looking race of creatures. Completely Stretchy exists in the latter, where the residents of the Grombi Isles vary in appearance from humanoid to heads on a single leg, from small and child-like to giant heads that I like to believe have been placed in homage to the ‘Face of Boe’. To the residents of the Grombi Isles, all of that is normal. What isn’t normal, is someone who is blue and can stretch their arm out and stick to structures like a chimera hybrid of Monkey D. Luffy, Spiderman and a Smurf.
Developed by Dan Ferguson in collaboration with Warp Digital, Completely Stretchy puts you in control of a one-armed Grombi. Caught in an explosion at work, your skin has been tinted a nice shade of blue, making you somewhat of an oddity in this world where the Grombi’s have no defined look or appropriate amount of appendages and each just exist as they are. It’s not all bad though, along with your new paint job your arm is now stretchy and can be thrown out to stick onto things, swinging yourself through the air or using it to pull yourself to higher places. As you traverse the islands and recover the Elektros that escaped in the accident you will gain the ability to stretch out further and stick to surfaces multiple times before having to touch the ground again.
This traversal method can take a little bit to get used to, especially as there are two distinct movement mechanics and sometimes when you want to swing you end up getting pulled up and losing momentum, while other times the opposite happens. As you play more, you will get better at it, but it did feel like I would often try to swing and get pulled up and lose my momentum or vice-versa. It is not a big issue in the grand scheme of things and it is usually not too hard to recover in those instances.
Completely Stretchy is all about exploring the world while solving environmental puzzles, completing platforming sections and the odd obligatory fetch quest. The three islands comprise three distinct biomes, each with secrets to discover and side quests to complete as you search for the Elektos to repair the power plant and figure out just what caused the accident. I was very fortunate in that I found the secret areas that allowed me to explore locked-off areas pretty quickly in the industrial and natural biomes. It could have taken me a lot longer as for some reason the map would no longer appear when I tried to open it, so I couldn’t even check the map for the locations of quest-givers or where people were to return their things to them. A very small bug but one that could have caused me a lot more trouble if I had not been lucky.
The art style is quite nice as well. With a mix of hand-drawn stylisation and a pastel colour palette, the world doesn’t overwhelm the senses and each of the three islands has a distinct style that instantly makes them recognisable in their own right. There are lots of weird little situational gags and quirky situations to find throughout the world as you explore, for example, a spin class where a bunch of Grombi’s are spinning in circles.
Probably the biggest issue I have with the game is the overarching narrative. The transition from finding and collecting the Elektros to finding out what caused the accident felt jarring because you go from wandering the world and just doing what you want to do, to essentially running from point-to-point-to-point and talking to other Grombi as you follow the trail. Granted my map had stopped working long before this point, so I could not look at it for a guide. This made it a bit more of a challenge, especially when trying to find the nightclub that I had never seen during my time with the game to that point.
While a bit on the short side, I managed to complete the story in just over four hours, there is more time to be spent for those players who are willing to spend the time to explore and find everything hidden within the Grombi Isles. For those looking for a relaxing experience that doesn’t overwhelm the senses and provides a bit of humour, then Completely Stretchy could be just the game you are looking for.
Completely Stretchy was reviewed on PC with code kindly supplied by the publisher.
