The best reason to own a Kinect is coming in July
Fru the looking glass.
It's no secret that the Kinect has been a colossal failure on Xbox One with very few developers implementing the motion-tracking peripheral in any notable way. That's about to change on 13th July with puzzle/platformer Fru, an Xbox One Kinect-exclusive that requires players to contort their body in tandem with more conventional gamepad controls.
As you can see in the trailer below, Fru tasks players with guiding an anthropomorphic fox through 2D stages where the environment is shaped by the player's literal reflection. Like it actually looks at your silhouette and you do the Human Tetris thing of making shapes with your body to manipulate the scenery.
Sometimes this means standing in a certain spot to make a vanishing bridge appear, other times you'll have to extend a limb to create a floating stream, and sometimes you'll have to reach magic crystals in far corners of the screen to alter the properties of your silhouette. Of course you can always cheat like the girl below who uses her flowing skirt to create a larger space. But maybe that's not cheating; it's ingenuity!
The full game will contain 110 levels across four chapters. There will also be 24 optional collectibles, offering especially fiendish challenges.
When asked about Microsoft's recent decision to omit Kinect ports in the Xbox One S and Project Scorpio, Fru developer Mattia Traverso told Eurogamer, "Honestly, it's not great. Having to get an adapter to use it just increases the number of steps it takes to set it up, which goes against any console philosophy of accessibility."
"Given the 4 to 5 million consoles shipped before unbundling the Kinect, there might be a viable audience, but yes, we are really worried we might not be able to reach out to it."
I played a little of Fru way back in 2014 at GDC. It looked very different back then, but the core mechanics were the same and it was a blast.
