So too are the bushes in the dry sand that perfect flash of those carefree days with our feet thokking across the sand, back and forth between the dry, wet and the shore… Some areas of the game have small playable components, where you can fly above the sea as a majestic ibis, feed pelicans, or explore the world beneath the waves.Įven these hail back to distant memories, where searching for cockles in the sand reminds me of the way the slightly soaked sand would firm up underfoot while hunting for bubbles that might lead to yabbies. You can backtrack if the passage passed too fast to be read, or zig along the beach. The days of cloud cover, rain, or the icy bite of the ocean, each of these made their mark the same, but it’s often the sunniest times that we remember.Īs you walk through the world of Storm Boy, the text of the story is shown on the screen, and the world around the boy carries on a little. The place we stayed most was itself affectionately called The Grey House by the family, yet there was never blandness in its moniker.

There were the dreary days too, but they were no less magical. So long as the clouds gave an occasional respite from the sun, it could run from morning until twilight, though there was always some interlude of sandwiches or hot chips that appeared just in time for the ravenous hunger that made itself known on the rush back to the encampment of towels and blankets. We, the ever-hurried suburbanites who were far too busy and serious to lose hours to one kind of play would spend eternal days on the beaches of Gerringong, Kioloa, Tuross and Narooma. It wasn’t the same southern shores on which Storm Boy is set, but a few degrees colder, and the places of the game could be pairs for the ones hidden in photo albums back home, even if home was somewhere different now. We spent most of our holidays on the beach when I was growing up. It wasn’t so prominent in my memory that I could remember the beats of the story, but as I played and the course of its path became inevitable, I found an anchor to the narrative through my own childhood. A video game that shares its title, developed by Blowfish Studios.Īs I played through the game, there was a familiarity around its setting, as though recalling something that I’d once learned but since forgotten. In the time between now and then, we have yet another. Others may have been brought to the story by the film adaptation of over forty years ago, and more may come in the next year, as a new adaptation is released. It’s most known and loved as the children’s book written by Australian author Colin Thiele, becoming a shared experience in so many childhoods, even those that may have forgotten it as time went on, only to rediscover it in the latter years as life took them somewhere different. Storm Boy – Memories of Childhood PC, Xbox One, PS4, Switch

Storm boy ps4