Tearaway was released on the PlayStation Vita in Australia on 20 November 2013, with Europe, North America and India following on 22 November and Japan on 5 December. Media Molecule developed it and Sony Computer Entertainment published it. It is a third-person platform adventure that treats the Vita’s odd hardware not as a gimmick to tolerate but as the actual point. The game was announced at Gamescom on 15 August 2012, and it went on to draw positive reviews from critics. Its published critical score stands at 8.6 out of 10 across 11 outlets.
Trailer, via PlayStation.
A Papercraft World Called ValleyFold
The premise is strange in the best way. Two characters, the Green Man and an unnamed Fortune Teller, open the game by speaking directly to the player, referred to throughout as the “You.” They live in a papercraft world named ValleyFold, stuffed with stories they have grown tired of hearing. So they ask the You to help build a new one.
That framing does real work. The Green Man and the Fortune Teller blow a hole in ValleyFold’s sun and send an envelope through it. The envelope lands in a field and becomes a papercraft humanoid, Iota or Atoi depending on the player’s choice, with the envelope itself as the head. This is the Messenger.
The Scraps and the Message
The Green Man then creates the Scraps, meant to serve as the story’s enemy. They attack the Messenger, and the You have to save them. After that, the Messenger is told to head for the sun and deliver a message to the You.
What follows is a journey through a ValleyFold now infested with Scraps. The You helps the Messenger navigate it and assists the people living there, including a ceremony involving apple-picking in an Orchard, cleared by defeating the nearby Scraps. Those people then point the Messenger toward Gibbet Hill, a mountain topped by a gigantic catapult that could reach the sun.
Gibbet Hill and the Catapult
The climb up Gibbet Hill enlists a Scarecrow pumpkin head for help. At the top, the Messenger finds a problem: the sun faces the opposite direction from the catapult. The You turns the mountain so it faces the sun, and the Messenger is launched toward it.
The game’s story is thin on its surface, and that is fine. Tearaway is not trying to be a novel. It is trying to make the player feel like a participant rather than a passenger, and the plot exists to serve that.
Almost Every Vita Feature, Used
The gameplay is where Tearaway earns its reputation. It uses almost all of the PlayStation Vita’s features in some way. In the announce trailer, the player meets an elk who needs a new skin, and can take a picture with the Vita’s camera and apply it to the papercraft animal.
At a Gamescom demo, Media Molecule showed the rear touch panel being used to push fingers up through the ground to interact with enemies and the environment. The player can customize Iota or Atoi by drawing designs on virtual paper, cutting them out, and applying them to the character. In another demo section, the player draws on the touchscreen to cut out a paper crown for a character.
There is also an in-game camera for collecting papercraft designs, and non-player characters can be helped in exchange for confetti, the game’s currency.
The game is inspired by papercraft and Rex Crowle’s drawings and doodles left around Media Molecule’s office.
Why the Hardware Play Works Here
Plenty of Vita games bolted on touch and camera controls because the hardware demanded it. Tearaway is the rare case where the input and the fiction are the same idea. The world is paper. The player’s fingers reach into it. The camera turns a real photograph into an elk’s hide.
That coherence is the whole argument for the game. Tearaway comes from the creative minds behind LittleBigPlanet, and the studio’s instinct for handmade, tactile worlds carries over cleanly. Where LittleBigPlanet asked players to build, Tearaway asks them to touch, cut, draw and look.
Iota, Atoi, and a Story About You
The choice between Iota and Atoi is small on paper. Two names, one messenger. But the game keeps addressing the player as the “You,” and that choice fits the same design logic. The Messenger is delivering a message to you. The Green Man and Fortune Teller built a story for you. The fourth wall is not a joke here; it is the load-bearing wall.
The Scraps, the Orchard ceremony, the Scarecrow pumpkin head, Gibbet Hill, the catapult, the sun that will not face the right way: these are simple pieces. They work because the player is asked to do something physical at nearly every turn, not just press a button.
Tearaway Unfolded and the Longer View
An expanded remake, Tearaway Unfolded, came to the PlayStation 4 on 8 September 2015. That version had to solve a hard problem: the PlayStation 4 has no rear touch panel. The Vita original is the version where the design and the device are inseparable.
This is the part worth watching in hindsight. The published critical score of 8.6 out of 10 across 11 outlets is not a fluke of generous reviewers. It is what happens when a studio stops treating hardware features as a checklist and starts treating them as the story.
The plot is slight, and the Messenger’s journey is carried more by interaction than by narrative weight. The challenge is in the interaction, not the difficulty.
What remains is a game about paper that feels handmade, and about a message that is genuinely addressed to the person holding the console. Media Molecule built a world held entirely in your hands, and then made sure your hands were part of it.
Get the Notebook.
The day's best stories and every fresh verdict, in plain English, in your inbox by seven. One email a day, no more.
