It was published in Europe by Electronic Arts, and by Activision in North America, Asia and Oceania under the name Relentless: Twinsen's Adventure.

The game was initially released on CD-ROM and some time later on floppy disks; the CD-ROM version features full-motion video, music and speech whereas the floppy disk version has MIDI music files and still images to replace the videos.

On October 20, 2015, an "Enhanced Edition" developed by DotEmu was released on Steam, alongside a re-release of the original game.

All characters and vehicles in the game, including some props in the world, are real 3D polygon-based objects, performing actions within 2D pre-rendered environments.

The game's gameplay is partially free-roaming, allowing the player to travel around the islands once they have been "unlocked" by completing certain objectives or solving certain puzzles; there are also many tasks which are optional or non-linear.

The player-character, Twinsen, can be switched between four different "behaviour modes" (Normal, Athletic/Sporty, Aggressive, and Discreet), each changing the character's abilities and interactions with the game world.

[9] The game is set on the fictional planet Twinsun, a world which is held in a suspended orbit between two suns resulting in a polar region around its equator.

Quetches are anatomically similar to humans except that they all possess ponytails, Spheros are short spherical creatures, Grobos resemble anthropomorphic elephants, and Rabbibunnies are rabbit-like humanoids.

The player character is a young Quetch named Twinsen, who has been incarcerated in an asylum on the fortress-like Citadel Island because of his prophetic dreams about the end of the world.

As Twinsen travels between the islands of the planet, seeking to find a way of overcoming FunFrock's clone army and freeing Zoe, he discovers that his strange dreams are in fact part of the Prophecy, a legendary tale regarding a being known as Sendell who is said to inhabit the core of the planet and watch over the people of Twinsun.

Twinsen's dreams are in fact telepathic messages sent by Sendell, who chose his ancestors to help her watch over the planet centuries prior and is now contacting Twinsen (as the current descendant of his family line) to warn the inhabitants of the planet of the danger posed by FunFrock.

In the Northern Hemisphere, FunFrock has established mutant and teleportation facilities enabling him to quell unrest anywhere on the planet.

Twinsen defeats FunFrock in a final confrontation, and him and Zoe encounter Sendell, a being appearing to consist purely of glowing electrical energy, who thanks them for saving a gestalt entity which she is protecting in the core of the planet.

[9] In an interview with Edge magazine, lead coder Serge Plagnol stated that Electronic Arts US division repeatedly requested that Twinsen be changed into a "much tougher character" and for him to "kick ass".

[12][13][14] In August 2011, co-founder of Adeline Software Didier Chanfray said in an interview that downloadable re-releases of both Little Big Adventure and its sequel were "under negotiation".

[15] On 11 October 2011, the game was re-released for download by GOG, where it is available for both the Windows (XP, Vista, 7) and Mac OS X (10.6.8 or newer) platform.

[16] In December 2011, discussion of a LBA1 remake was revealed in an interview with Frédérick Raynal, Sébastien Viannay and Didier Chanfray posted on GOG.

Writer Daniel Ichbiah blamed this on Electronic Arts' "incoherent marketing" of the game, and Frédérick Raynal criticized the publisher's decision to give Little Big Adventure a more aggressive name and cover artwork, and to portray combat in its advertisements.