GDC: Ruben & Lullaby Hands-On

By Matt Dunn, USA
for www.touchgen.com

Published: March 25, 2009

Stroke her face. Make her sad.

We stumbled into Opertoon on the show floor, and the experience with their “Ruben & Lullaby” demo was both weird and intoxicating. The idea is something that I haven’t seen before, and it’s quite good.

Essentially, there is a story being told with graphic novel style. In this story, there is a couple on a bench in a park who are deciding the fate of their relationship. As you tilt the phone left or right, you see either Ruben or Lullaby, and their expression dictates their current emotions. This actually will denote when the game ends, as the developer mentioned you have about 30 frames back and forth until the scene ends and the fate is decided.

The interactivity comes in when you either shake the phone to anger the character, or stroke the phone to sooth them (and make them sad). You will notice that both the music and images change based on your actions. It’s a very strange but cool feeling as you slowly control the undertones of the scene. Strangely enough, after doing nothing but sooth both characters for the entire scene, Lullaby walked away at the end of it… so maybe I didn’t “stroke” her well?

All in all, I can see this becoming quite an engrossing experience if it were applied to a much larger storyline, or maybe even used within other games as interactive cutscenes. Ruben and Lullaby is an experimental title, and is not your typical “game” title. It is current available on the App Store, and you can pick it up for $.99 here.

Review disclosure: Any games reviewed on this page may have been provided to us by the developer for the purposes of this review. Note: the resulting review score is never impeded by this fact, all opinions are that of the TouchGen reviewer and not the developer. This is in keeping with our O.A.T.S oath. Read more about O.A.T.S here

One Comment on "GDC: Ruben & Lullaby Hands-On"

iPGN-Dave on Fri, 27th Mar 2009 4:37 pm

It was weird, but interesting.

GDC: Ruben & Lullaby Hands-On

Related articles

Latest articles