You know that bit at the beginning of The Wizard of Oz? When the twister stops twisting, the farmhouse plummets, and Dorothy pulls back the door to reveal that bright, glorious world stuffed with mystery and magic? That’s how I felt when I first stepped out into Pandora.
Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora reviewDeveloper: Ubisoft Massive, UbisoftPublisher: UbisoftPlatform: Played on PCAvailability: Out 7th December on PC (Ubisoft), PS5, Xbox Series X/S, Amazon Luna
It’s a joyous, breathtaking, mesmerising rush of colour and texture, where light dapples through the canopy and sprinkles jewels of white light into the lakes and streams and waterfalls below. There are birds and fish and deer – well, kind of; the fauna here is fantastical reimaginings of the wildlife we know on Earth – and at first, there’s just so much , it kind of hurts your eyes. It kind of hurts your brain. What, exactly, are you supposed to be looking at here? The tree? The vines growing on the tree? The plants growing on the vines that grow on the trees? The deer-esque silhouettes the plants growing on the vines that grow on the trees? Where does one life begin and the next end? Where am I supposed to go? What the hell am I supposed to ?
Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora even nails The Wizard of Oz’s sneaky bait and switch, too. For the first thirty minutes of your adventure, you’re confined to the dull, terminally grey world of humankind, a cold place of concrete, steel, and fluorescents. There is no colour here. No light. No hope. It’s only after you scurry through dark vents that you’ll burst into Pandora, thrown head-first from a life of monotone monotony into a strange, thrilling new technicolour world that you and the Sarentu you embody must explore together.
You don’t have to be familiar with any of the Avatar media that’s come before to make sense of Frontiers of Pandora, and I can say that with confidence because I’ve never seen the films or even know very much about the franchise. It doesn’t matter, though; the metaphors here are neither subtle nor sophisticated.