DISCLAIMER: This review is not a review, it's a bumbling, messy rant I wrote at 2 AM. I apologize in advance for any grammar and spelling errors, as well as the occasional nonsensical sentence.

It has truly been some time since a game has so fully captured me to the degree that Little Big Planet has. There is something truly special about this game that is only shared with some of the best I’ve ever played, in fact, the last time a game was able to make me feel anything like this would have been my first playthrough of Super Mario Galaxy. I don’t Think I can ever truly, properly put it into words, but I'll certainly give it a try.

Before the actual review I’ll start by saying that I don’t have any nostalgia for this game, In fact, my first time ever playing would’ve been the day before writing this review. All of my opinions stem from very freshly playing through the game and experiencing everything it had to offer for myself.


This may be a fairly generic statement, but I think everyone can agree that today’s world has more than its fair share of misery. These past few months for me it's felt like on a global level there have been historical levels of suffering and wrongdoing happening all at once, and there is nothing I can do about it. When combined with the smaller stresses of simply living your life, it can be easy to accidentally start to live with a dark cloud over your head. This is not to say that I’m a miserable person or anything, It's just that I feel we sometimes forget how important it is to smile. I am of the opinion that we need more ways to spread positivity and happiness in the world, and that is exactly what Little Big Planet is. Little Big Planet completely counteracts everything negative I just mentioned on a personal level in nearly every way. It feels so purely created with the sole intention of bringing childlike joy and wonder to the faces of all who play it. From the animation to the music to the gameplay, everything feels so lovingly, passionately created to be the absolute best it can be. One of my favourite things about all forms of media, be it traditional books, comics, movies, tv, or games, is that they can give you such intense emotions that you would normally be unable to experience in ordinary life. Through Seething anger or incredible sadness, I’ve been affected by many of the things that I have watched, read, and played, but there is one thing even the best of movies and games are often not capable of, something that makes them truly stand out above the rest if they can accomplish it, and that's them being capable of transmitting pure, unfiltered joy to the same degree that they can other emotions. Throughout my whole playthrough, Little Big Planet had me grinning ear to ear. It's the first time in so long that I’ve been so completely invested in a game, that I’ve spent so much time in a game all at once, that I’ve been willing to give up doing anything else to actually find time to play, and since I’ve had my love for video games so overwhelmingly re-ignited like this. For all that alone, I will likely forever remember Little Big Planet and consider it one of the all time greats that I’ve played, But there is still so much more to discuss here.

Before even discussing the gameplay, there is so much to appreciate about Little Big Planet. Everything feels meticulously handcrafted, because it literally is. This game at its core is a level editor that all players have the ability to use, and the developers truly mastered everything about that level editor and managed to produce levels for the story mode that wouldn't feel out of place if they were found within a real, purely 2D triple A platformer. Within these levels there are representations of cultures from all over the world that are so obviously lovingly represented, and they have great humor to go along with them. This game genuinely made me laugh a few more times than I would have expected. The sackboy that you explore the Levels with is also an incredible addition to this game. Each sackboy exhibits so much personality and is so excellently animated. Something about their expressions just makes their emotions feel so real. The Developers really went above and beyond when it came to allowing players to fully express themselves without even speaking.

Speaking of player expression, the one part of this game that I’m really devastated I’ll never get to experience is the online. Exploring an infinite amount of community made levels with my friends and other people while being able to fully express myself and have fun at the same time seems like it would have been an absolute dream. I get hit by a little wave of sadness everytime see the crossed out online buttons on my screen, but even without them I had plenty to love about the game.

The campaign mode is spent helping numerous troubled characters throughout the earth in any way you can. Often just seeing how the developers had crafted characters and made them feel so alive through the crude level editor was enough to make me laugh, but it was also very charming. Every step of the way you are offered encouragement and witness so much creativity it's hard to not just constantly smile. Alongside just being fun to play through, these levels feel like they would be excellent inspiration for anyone who would have tried to truly dedicate themselves to the level creator as well.

In terms of actual gameplay, this is definitely the weakest part of the game, but still fun. It controls like a standard 2D platformer, with the sole issue being that sometimes sackboy feels a little bit slippery to control, putting you in the occasional situation that will feel a little unfair. Otherwise though the level design is so clever that the game never gets old. There are so many gameplay concepts and ideas featured within them I almost wish there were more levels so I could have seen them more fully explored. The game does get more difficult towards the end, but even with the slightly awkward controls I never felt it was too unfair, despite having to redo some levels a fair few times. What it really shows is that this game's potential for level design is more or less unlimited, something that would have made it all the more amazing when the servers were still up and running.

The music (partially composed by the guy who did spiderverse btw) was also a key factor to my enjoyment of this game. Almost every track is so uplifting and happy it felt like it was directly planting energy into my soul. Somehow these songs make me feel nostalgic despite having literally never heard them before yesterday. There are just so many different instruments and styles of music that all collide together in this game, making it one of my favourite gaming soundtracks of all time. Maybe I’m just weird but there were even 1 or 2 very oddly nice tracks that even made me tear up a bit.

In conclusion, Little Big Planet is just kind of a perfect video game to me. The combination of its endless creativity, interactive community, fun gameplay, and amazing music gives me the impression that it was lovingly created with the sole purpose of spreading Joy throughout the world, something we can always use more of. It's very rare that something is able to make me feel the childlike wonder I experienced while playing this game, and I'm so grateful I just randomly happened to check it out. Everything about it feels so human; you can clearly see the overwhelming passion behind the game poured into every nook and cranny within it, something I’ve only really been able to notice in a very small few of the best games I’ve played. In my opinion, more games should strive to be as joyous and as pleasant an experience as Little Big Planet. I definitely feel like this is a game everyone should try playing at least once in their lives, because if for some reason it strikes the same chord with you as it did with me, you’ll never regret it.

This game is perfection.

I cannot express in words how much this game means to me and how it defined the fondest and happiest part of my childhood.

The eternal soundtrack, the lovable design and charm of Sackboy, the cute and simplistic story and look of everything, the endless creativity, and ALL the people I met on this game. Some say there are things in the world that can only be experienced once or invoke the sentiment of "you just had to be there/in the moment." This game was that for me.

Ever since the servers shut down due to hacking, it feels like a part of me died and never came back. And to be honest, I don't think the hole left behind will ever be filled. But regardless, I can't help but be thankful that I got to play LittleBigPlanet in my lifetime. I hope it'll return someday in the form of a remaster or a LittleBigPlanet 4.

Thank you for everything, LittleBigPlanet.

Genuinely one of the best platformers ever made, full of endless amounts of charm and soul. The psychics engine in this game is very impressive, especially considering this game was made on 2006 hardware. Creating levels is an absolute joy as the in game tutorials are full of the series' trademark British humour. Despite the official servers not being around anymore, there exist all sorts of community ran servers and archive projects to make you reexperience old levels or dive into a swath of new ones. Remarkably, the only difference between current and old LBP community levels is that the new ones use more contemporary memes while being about the same in quality.

The only real issues with the game are the lack of more substantial level creation tools and to some extent the story not being as fleshed out or memorable as it is in later entries (Except LBP3, screw Sumo and Sony.)

May LBP shitposting live on for another hundred years.

Certainly not lost on me how shallow my revisit of LBP1 was. This was something of a childhood fave of mine I threw countless hours at; be it in couch co-op with fwiends or alone in my room exploring the avalanche of user-created content people spun together. Neither of which was a factor in me revisiting it for the first time in well over a decade now (jezus farckin christ!!!!), the servers are long gone and I’d need to be the richest man alive to bribe someone to play this with me over a cocktail of Parsec + RPCS3 input lag. Nobody will ever understand the joy of slapping the aztec cock motif on your co-op partners’ faces siiiighghhh…. Still, an illuminating experience that rekindled something in my heart about what LBP1 stood for!

Admittedly, I was always more of an LBP2 kid, these games being modular meant there was very little reason to revisit the first game once the sequel came out. There is a very strong difference in vibes between the two games though, if LBP1 excels at anything, it’s in encouraging the player to go off and create for themselves. It’s kind of wild the extent to which LBP1 offers and explains its tools to the player - its relatively simple levels make no effort to hide the gadgets that make ingame events work. Stages are littered with visible emitters, tags, switches, stuff like only-slightly offscreen circuitry that you can watch move around to inform a boss of its attack patterns and phases. It feels like a child’s art project or something, a simple array of pulleys and string animating rudimentary creatures and swings. It’s all so laid bare, I kind of adore it, and is certainly a handcrafted energy that LBP2 loses in its explosion of visual polish. The constant delivery of decorations, objects, prebuilt things you can make your own edits of, it’s no wonder this game blew up in the way it did - it’s with you every step of the way and always acts as a shockingly good teacher for its own mechanics.

Anyway this was a lot of fun. Unquestionably a hilarious platforming title to insist upon having no-death run rewards when so much of your survivability hinges on Sackboy’s physics-based astrology. You don’t realise how much nostalgia you have for something until the first thirty seconds of a song makes you tear up. This kind of williamsburg scrapbook aesthetic is hard to stomach nowadays but it really works here. Holy shit I can’t believe the racist caricatures this game has in every corner, this truly is a quintessentially British game.

It's impossible for me to rate this objectively since the series was so integral to my childhood.

I don't care about being objective though. This shit goes hard. The aesthetic is wholly unique and endlessly charming, the customization options are endless, the level creation and sharing were revolutionary, and the soundtrack goes so hard. It has 4 player multiplayer! Any flaws that the game has are completely outshone by everything it does right.

However with the online servers dead, this is a shadow of its former self. You can't publish any levels you make, and while levels that were already published are available in the PS4 version of LBP3, they often run poorly and look slightly off.

It's hard to recommend anyone to go back to it or any other entries in the series because of what it's lacking in modern times. People certainly aren't wrong to complain about the floaty controls. I'm personally not a fan of the lives system considering the difficulty spike it introduces when playing with multiple players. The difficulty of the story mode is a bit too high considering the game's tone and intended audience. I would still easily recommend this to anyone that is interested in this era of gaming, but in the end it's part of a series that is conceptually and (mostly) literally stuck on the PS3.

What a charming little game, a globe-throtting adventure through the lens of a child's arts and crafts project.
It's not the most mechanically demanding game, however its unorthodox physics-based control scheme and level design is unique enough to warrant a visit, even in its current stripped down state.

Of course that was never the main selling point of LittleBigPlanet as an experience, this was once a game with an ungodly amount of possibilities for self-expression - nearly every mechanic exists in the context of allowing you to customize everything around you, including the levels themselves.
It was kind of the perfect game for kids at the time, a place that allowed you to create your own ways to play and share them with others, both as hubs for them to experience by themselves and as things you can show to the people playing with you at that very moment.

I still enjoy going back to the game's campaign from time to time, it's very cute and charming, but nothing will ever quite match the heights of playing this with friends near and far on a summer afternoon.

game that introduced me to many different walks of life back in 2008, this is literally one of the only games i can think of that really explored a bunch of the world's diverse cultures and i appreciate it so much for that. i think it really helped me in becoming who i am today in some small way, definitely a massive part of my childhood, from 2008-2012 with the first 2 installments.

the story mode in this game is good, but where it really shines is the online multiplayer games, the community always felt so connected with different trends going on always and levels where people would share fun and inventive ideas. many more games would go on to include community-featured content but no game quite does it like this game did.

Pure nostalgia! In LBP, you play as Sackboy; a boy made of... sack? You traverse through cleverly designed platforming levels whilst jamming out to what must be one of the best game soundtracks of all time! We're talking 'The Go! Team', 'Battles', And last but not least: Muthafuckin' Daniel Pemberton! With his TV Orchestra, he created this masterpiece of an OST, intertwined with other songs by the previously mentioned artist and more!

I want to quickly mention the level design again. It really feels like the game devs created the game engine just to have fun making clever levels, and it just so happens that they were working on a game at the same time. No level feels pushed or like they had to create it for level's sake. Pure fun all the way through!