Bayonetta Origins is basically the anti-Platinum Platinum game. It's slow(er) paced than their regular fare, it's focused more on exploration and story than on pure combat. It's not a constant spectacle that's in a constant struggle with itself to keep raising the stakes, to constantly one up what came before it. And it actually really works.

The story's premise is pretty simple, but the storybook presentation really elevates it. Platinum's style of pseudo-cutscenes isn't nearly as jarring as normal when it's presented as turning the pages in a book, and the excellent narration makes even the more mundane scenes a joy to watch. The story's themes of family and friendship were handled pretty well and a few scenes were legitimately touching The way the game starts out slow and builds up to the kind of spectacle you expect from a Platinum game also makes the ending sequence one of Platinum's best, up there with The Wonderful 101 and the original Bayonetta.

None of that would matter if the game wasn't fun to play, but Platinum managed to pull off a completely different style of gameplay really well. At its core it's still a combo focused action game, but there's a much bigger emphasis on exploration, puzzle solving, and backtracking and built around controlling two characters at once. Avalon Forest is a labyrinth, with winding paths layered on top of each other, secret passageways locked behind Cheshire's various elemental abilities, and shortcuts to make backtracking easier. Exploration is mostly rewarded with the two currencies you use to upgrade Cereza and Cheshire, but you'll also find captive wisps that populate a rather comfy hideaway when freed, various text logs exploring the setting and the history of the Faeries, and optional challenges in the form of Tir Na Nogs, this game's version of Alfheim areas or the equivalent from your Platinum game of choice. A lot of these are required to beat the game, but quite a few are off the beaten path and uncover extra parts of the map once completed. As far as the actual combat goes, controlling Cereza and Cheshire with two different sides of the same controller can be a little cumbersome at first, but it ends up working really well. My only real complaint is that dodge is mapped to clicking in the control stick for each character, but that's actually not as much of an issue as it sounds since both characters move pretty quickly, and you can always call Cheshire back with a tap of the L button.

The presentation is probably the one thing I don't need to talk about, but I'll do it anyway since holy shit is this a beautiful game. The whole world has this painted look to it, with the environment fading in and out in the background. That, coupled with the fact that the game does that thing where patterns don't actually move with what they're on and instead shift as things move and instead shift around like the object is just a window that the pattern sits behind (I have no clue what this is called but the cartoon Chowder did the same thing iirc), gives everything a dreamlike feel to it. The piano-focused soundtrack also plays into that whole dreamlike feel, which perfectly fits the changing and illusory Avalon Forest.

I had a few small issues with the game like how the game doesn't really open up mechanically until around the halfway point or how the map is a little hard to read, but honestly those are minor complaints considering how much I enjoyed my time with it. I have no idea what the team that worked on this game was smoking when they decided to make a family-friendly isometric Bayonetta spinoff about a young Cereza, but man do I hope they keep smoking it. Between this, Sol Cresta, and the After-School Hero DLC for TW101 Remastered, Platinum's been branching out from their classic gameplay style, and I'm all for it. I'd love to see them go for something super weird for them like a full puzzle game or something, just to see how they'd approach that. I love Platinum's signature style and all that, but when stepping away from that leads to a game as good as this, I'm really curious as to what else the studio is capable of.