For the first couple of hours in LittleBigPlanet, Stephen Fry’s narration, a reprise of his role as the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, threatens to steal the show. If not that then Sackboy, an expressive dress-me-up doll whose arms and head you can move with sticks and tilt, and whose mood you control with the D-pad, will. So careful is the introduction to this overwhelming game, and so reliant is it on paternal, unpatronising presentation, that you wonder if anything is underneath. Later, you’ll wonder if anything isn’t. Then, at work, on the train or as you drift off to sleep, you’ll wonder a little bit more. And by the time you wonder if the wondering will ever stop, you already know the answer.

By now, you’ll have likened the game to many things. Halo 3’s Forge; every Mario rolled into one; STOS and AMOS, the seminal 16-bit game-making kits; those Japanese assault course shows on Challenge TV; or an Oxford Street window display at Christmas. And what you’ll notice is that for every game it resembles, it also resembles something real.

Yes, LittleBigPlanet is a platform game, with a complete story mode of over 50 levels and minigames, all with scoreboards and support for online party play. And, yes, it’s a construction set so sophisticated that it created every one of them. But above all, it’s a world – one built with such incredible attention to detail that you half expect it to spill from the screen and across the floor.

It’s a world with widely reinforced physical rules, which to those expecting a PC-like editor will immediately seem like a compromise. Nothing could be farther from the truth. As you piece together a level out of various materials, colour it with stickers and use levers, switches, sensors and couplers to turn it into a game, the most you can do to suspend its physics is literally press pause. Only then can objects hover without being anchored, or be edited without their behaviour causing problems. Hit play and life in LittleBigPlanet resumes, anything not glued or propped in place tumbling as gravity decrees. Furthermore, the game occurs on three planes in ‘2.5D’ – if something in the background falls behind the foreground, you have to move the obstruction to select and retrieve it.



Does this make life as easy as it could be? No. It enriches it instead. As you hop, grab and swing your way through a complete level, be it yours, one of thousands sure to be uploaded, or Media Molecule’s own, behind every piece is the story of how it got there – how it was brought into being with no tricks, just a spot of glue, a dab of curiosity and some perfectly selected bric-a-brac. Scientists in the Edge laboratory tested the principle by building the first level of Strider. The stars (LEDs) had to be pressed into blackened cardboard and moored to the rooftops; the searchlights were mounted on bookmarks and slipped behind the scene. That’s not computer-aided design – it’s stagecraft, a physical kind of magic.