Narita Boy

There are a few things that I need to mention, other than I got this for free during a GOG giveaway: Pros: - Excellent vibe and art, plus the music is enjoyable. Cons: - Post-processing is way overdone. In the screenshots they had chromatic aberration (eye cancer) but thankfully that seems to be gone in the actual game in favour of a soft blur at the screen's edge. I want to turn off all lens and visual effects. You don't need to dress up pixel art. What's the point? - Default controls are VERY bad and cannot be remapped. They give you a choice between two bad gamepad configurations instead of letting you map buttons yourself. Both control options resulted in many deaths, so I gave up in frustration.

While the game has some unnecessarily convoluted and often nonsensical lore, and quite a few moments where players are left wandering without a clear indication of what the path forward is, the overall atmosphere - aided by the lovely retro art style and the synth soundtrack - make this a rewarding experience. Not quite as free-roaming as a metroidvania, the journey is a tad more linear, but this helps avoid even more moments of confusion. Overall, a recommended experience.

I absolutely love this game, no question about it. The aesthetics are absolutely wonderful, the story I saw so far is interesting, the art style gorgeous and the music lovely. Yet, I'm setting this aside for a while and there's one single reason for it: the gameplay has some insanely frustrating elements. Now, I remember games back in the day - I was born in 1986 - were hard as hell, that's not the issue. I was relentlessly playing this, going from challenge to challenge and enjoying, but the absolute nonsense the Servohorse section is, stopped me in my tracks. I'm a causal gamer with a job and other things to do, I don't have the time anymore to sink in hours upon hours into one single game, or let alone anything - and games are on a lower priority right now anyway. As I said, I love this game and will surely come back to it, but for now, this is all from me. I encourage everyone to try it, it's amazing, but be prepared for some major frustrations.

Love the look and the feel this game gives you, only amplified by it's interesting story. HOWEVER, the diologe is so conviluded it's hard to figure out what's going on some times. And worst of all that killed the game for me. The slopy controlls. If I'm struggling to land platforms without ousdie issues, that's bad, but then the game has a VERY bad tendency to have enmies just constantly sneek up from under you, or have them tank up through your blows and just mash you. It's very fiddly platforming that never feels good, and the combat always feels like your not doing enough to harm the enemy, and that the game is on their side, making hard to fight them without taking a ton of damage in the process. It's not worth the frustration. I'll just watch TRON or some anime that like this instead.