When I reviewed Along Together last month I found a wonderfully sweet adventure game with bags of charm and some inventive uses of the Daydream’s motion controller. Sharing a strikingly similar premise, Climax Studios’ Lola And The Giant is much the same story, perhaps with a touch more ambition in the mix and in need of a little more polish.
Crucially, Lola And The Giant digs just a little deeper into using VR as a tool to grow a bond between two characters. Here, a young girl called Lola awakens in a mysterious cave, and travels through various worlds in a search of a way back home. She’s accompanied by a giant rock monster that she stumbles upon in the first level. Intimidating though he may be, the giant is the very definition of gentle, calmly murmuring Sim-like phrases to Lola, who replies with more enthusiastic, peppy made up words.
Progressing through each level requires you to alternate between the two characters. Lola is controlled from third-person, while the Giant is operated from first-person. Both have their own sets of abilities that you’ll need to mix and match. Giant is able to lift heavy objects, smash rocks, fire catapults and more, while Lola can change the size of items, narrowing the distance between platforms or raising and lowering others.
While the game starts out with some fairly basic linear puzzling it doesn’t take long to open itself up. Emerging from the cave, you’ll find floating islands flooded with lava, tropical beaches, snowy peaks and more. These levels range in length, but don’t be surprised if you find yourself spending more than 40 minutes or so in some of them. While it’s great to have so much content, this is the first Daydream game I’d found my Pixel phone to really struggle with; as early as 10 minutes into a play session the framerate would cut to becoming borderline unplayable.
It’s a shame, as it hinders the progress you can make in straight sittings. While it’s not entirely down to Climax itself, it certainly feels like more could have been done of the optimization front; I haven’t had these issues anywhere else. That said, few Daydream games have levels as large as Lola And The Giant, and at any time you can zoom out to Giant’s view and get a lay of pretty much the entire land.
Doing so is a treat, as the game boasts a pleasingly sweet tone with storybook worlds populated by imaginative characters. You’ll meet new friends that are bizarre mixes of different animals in pretty much every level, and Climax paints them with a darkly comic tone. You’ll get a few laughs out of Lola’s interactions with the world’s inhabitants for sure, and you’ll often want to take the time to just soak in each level’s waterfalls.
Much of the gameplay resolves around simple fetch quests. You’re sent out to find food, totems, chimes, and more in order to please one character and unlock the path to meet someone else. There’s an air of repetition to it, though each quest mixes things up with different kinds of puzzles, like having you cook to feed a giant dog, or switch between Lola and the Giant to figure out where statues should be placed based on markings. Some of these make great use of the Daydream controller.
That said, the basic functions of the controller are a little troublesome. To move Lola you swipe up on the touchpad and then point to where you want her to travel. The game can have some trouble getting you to navigate jumps or in general when you’re up against edges, and you’ll find Lola falls off the side. In one level that you largely traverse by boat I got outright stuck in some corners and had to reset the game. It needs a little tightening up for sure, which is a shame given the presentation is stellar.
When these issues aren’t presenting themselves, Lola And The Giant makes for — I’ll just say it — charming family fun. It’s not challenging neither in its difficulty nor in its treatment of VR, but it’s guaranteed to keep you entertained from start to finish.
Ultimately Lola And The Giant falls neatly into the same territory as Along Together; it’s utterly pleasant, with a few niggles holding it back. It’s a lovely example of the beautiful worlds VR can create and its charming appeal makes it one of the few child-friendly VR games out there, but it’s got performance and control issues that hinder it from reaching the heights of Daydream’s best.
Lola And The Giant is available now on Google Daydream for $10.99. Read our Game Review Guidelines for more information on how we arrived at this score.
