Tearaway Tears Into The Vita This October

Tearaway, the tactile adventure game from the team at Media Molecule, finally has a release date. You can start looking out for virtual paper cuts on the Vita come October 22nd. To celebrate, enjoy a new trailer exploring the “Origins of a Papercraft World.”

If you’re a developer, how exactly do you follow-up a massive do-it-yourself platforming romp like LittleBigPlanet? In the case of Media Molecule, the answer appears to be “think smaller.” I’m not referring to the Tearaway’s content or concept, of course, but rather the platform it will call home. Rather than remain within the comfy confines of the PlayStation 3, MM has instead opted to once again expand their horizons and try something new and risky. Tearaway is headed to the PlayStation Vita and, in case you’re just now hearing about the game or haven’t checked out that embedded video, it offers players some extremely unique ways to interact with the game.

In Tearaway, the player must control an adorable messenger on a quest to deliver a very important letter to, well, the player, actually. Kind of neat, right? In order to do this, you must guide the messenger through a unique world built entirely out of paper, utilizing augmented reality (sort of) to help move things along. The player can tap the back touch pad to catapult the messenger to higher ground, for instance, or reach into the world by poking their finger “through” the ground.

A lot of people complain that with new technology, developers feel pressure to shoehorn in features that utilizes all those new bells and whistles. That’s a fair argument most of the time but, with Tearaway, it looks like the entire game world was built with these types of interactions in mind. If we’re lucky, this could be that big, bright game that truly takes advantage of the Vita’s unique input methods and rolls them into a game that could not be played on any other platform.

Look for Tearaway to be delivered to the Vita on Oct. 22.