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To play Tintin is to see shadows of some of the most unlikely videogame matches possible.
There is a lot of the stealth of Arkham Asylum here – one of the central gameplay patterns places Tintin in a room of villains that must be knocked out individually, and if possible, silently. The boy reporter was never one for out-and-out fighting (despite what Spielberg’s film would have you believe), so much of these combat sections involve using the scenery to Tintin’s advantage.
Like Batman, Tintin hides in the walls and in the vents, ready to launch at the right moment. Like Batman, he uses items in the environment to his advantage – suits of armour, beach balls, banana peels. They may be less cool than Batman’s wonderful toys, but the design works in similar ways. Like Batman, Tintin uses the environment to create distractions, and to launch surprise attacks. Tintin was always smarter than his enemies, and not more powerful, and the design reflects that. There may be more violence in a single level of this game than there is in an entire album of Herge’s comics, but it’s a light, comical kind of combat that often relies on your brain as much as your ability to smash buttons.
It also works because it allows Tintin a kind of acrobatic grace, forcing Tintin to climb, roll, crawl and jump more than he needs to punch or kick. While not overtly present in the comic books, this acrobatic tendency is not new in the Tintin universe – as Crikey’s Luke Buckmaster noted, in the 1960s French live-action Tintin film, Tintin and the Mystery of the Golden Fleece, the reporter was played by the very acrobatic Jean-Pierre Talbot. This kind of grace of movement seemed a natural segue from the implied fluidity of the comics, and it works well here, too.
On the subject of movement and fighting, there is also a lot of Nintendo’s brawling series, Super Smash Bros. here too. The side-on, two-dimensional style is common to both games, while the animated movement of the characters seems equally similar. Haddock has the heavy grace of a Captain Falcon, while Castafiore shares the aerial mobility of a Princess Peach or Zelda.
Something about the way both games frame their spaces also tallies. Tintin moves between square and rectangular rooms with multiple levels – for all they could be any prototypical two-dimensional platforming game, they have a certain rigidness about them that speaks to Smash Bros.’s design.
Yet for Tintin, there is also a more obvious forebear. Tintin’s flat and square arenas become the flat and square frames of Hergé’s comics, while the gutter between comic images becomes the movement between each area. The concept art available as an added extra for the game makes this clear: the spatial structures of the game are the spatial structures of the comic books
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