OC Profile: Polly Geon

The main character of an obscure 3D platformer from the mid 90s, Polly Geon is a happy go lucky and carefree girl who enjoys her life within the realms of her game, happy to be the player character in any situation. Being a rather simple girl in both body and mind, Polly doesn’t have too much to her in terms of complexity. Her emotions mainly consist of happiness and sadness, only being a set amount of textures for her face along with a short collection of animations; whilst her voice is a short selection of clips that are sped up or slowed down to suit the situation. This means that Polly cannot speak properly, outside of short phrases like “I did it!” “Yippie!” “Perfect for Polly!”

Released exclusively for the 3DO, “Gem World Panic!” saw the adventures of a young girl known as Polly living in the Happy Hills of the World of Gems. That is, until a terrible evil came and destroyed the Grand Gemeraldites, the guardian forces of the world. Without the Gemeraldites, the evil force could take over the world, but not before the shards of the Gemeraldites were scattered across the world, with the gem cores landing right in front of Polly’s house. Before she knew it, she became linked with their powers, a sign to the young girl that she was the one who needed to put a stop to the evil force that plagued the world.

Her role in the game mainly consists of running and jumping about the land in order to travel the World of Gems and reach the Gemeraldite Palace, where the evil resides. To help, the power of the Gemeraldites gives her special abilities. The yellow Gemeraldite grants her super speed, the blue Gemeraldite grants her the ability to hover in the air; the red Gemeraldite gives her a powerful headbutt attack. These can all be used for platforming, combat and puzzle solving. Polly needs to collect Gemeraldite shards in order to use her abilities. The emblem on her shirt shows how many times she can use an ability. When a Gemeraldite emblem has no colour, she can’t use it anymore.

Similarly, Polly will lose parts of her body when she takes damage, reducing it to a wireframe form and losing her ability to use one of her powers. If she only has one health left, her entire body will be wireframe and she will have no abilities to use. When she dies, Polly will collapse into a pile of wires before disintegrating. She will then respawn at the last checkpoint she was at. Checkpoints are marked by flags with benches nearby them. Polly has four pieces of health in total. To regain health, Polly will need to find Gemeraldice Cream, her favourite food.

“Gem World Panic!” was not received very well. Critics complained about the game’s unnecessarily frustrating mechanics, the bland environments that looked more like random placements of blocks rather than actual levels or settings, as well as the annoying and grating protagonist due to her very boring look and low quality voice (One reviewer likened losing a life with her sounding like “A blood curdling scream” due to how terrible the sound quality was.) The game never received any positive reviews and ended up on many “Worst of” lists for it’s year, as well as selling poorly due to the poor word of mouth. As such, “Gem World Panic!” is seen as a collector’s item, going for ludicrous prices due to its rarity, along with the only known merchandise of Polly, a collection of stickers that came with the game’s manual.