Picking up the pieces…
Mr. Coo is stuck in a weird, nonsensical world, and he needs your help to get out of it -but first of all, he needs to find all his pieces and be whole again! There might be some philosophical strife behind all this nonsense, but with all the chaotic monsters, crazy robots and one-eyed ladies, it’s kinda hard to say. With an astounding and colourful hand-drawn 2D cartoon art, and a surrealist and whimsical story, full of absurd humour, wacky characters and crazy situations and innovative puzzles, The Many Pieces of Mr. Coo is a fresh take of the graphic adventure genre that will bring together veterans of these gamers and newcomers alike.
The Many Pieces of Mr. Coo is your typical point-and-click game, but it is so bizarre in its presentation that I honestly don’t know what it was all about. It has a lot of random elements and dark humour that for some reason works and it does it well. After a while you’ll be cut up into 3 pieces and have to try and reunite them as you switch between the head and legs to try and rescue the torso.
Yes, you read that line right. You control Mr. Coo’s head and legs which are separate from each other. The puzzles are clever and there’s a hint system if you do get stuck, but if you don’t then the bad news….you can complete the game in roughly 30-40 minutes. It’s a real shame it’s so short when the animation and art design is this good. If it was a cartoon itself, I’d easily give it a much higher score…but the fact is that you are paying quite a bit for a really short experience.
Add in that the creator has been working on this since 2012, but has come to blows with the studio in a Twitter/X statement and you can see that it definitely isn’t the full product that he wanted to deliver to everyone. It’s so frustrating to see a game with such potential both visually and in terms of a traditional point-and-click to run into these sort of problems.
The Verdict
The Many Pieces of Mr. Coo has some of the most ingenious animation I’ve seen in years. It’s not something that I will forget any time soon and even though it isn’t the experience that creator Nacho Rodríguez wanted to deliver, it’s still a memorable experience and I really hope we get to see more of Mr. Coo in the future.