Every frame of the game is worth hanging on a wall. Oddly the same creative beauty that makes the game stand out is really its biggest limiting factor. It’s the video game ‘80’s box art promised. From enemy designs to backgrounds, from CRT tracking effect to death animations, everything is a pixelated joy. Not one artistic element of the game felt like corners were cut. I constantly found myself just taking in the world. Pulling heavily on aesthetics from almost 40 years ago, deriving off games almost 10 years ago, and released during an era drowning in “retro” titles, Narita Boy still oozes its own unique style. Even the gameplay shares a similar, on-rails quality that can feel limiting, but again, takes it a step further with varied mechanics and enemy types. Its Superbrothers: Sword & Sworcery EP influence is worn on its sleeve with a same-vein art style that feels ratcheted up. Even still, everything feels satisfying because of how fleshed out the world feels. The game offers a variety of skills and unlockables that all feel a little under utilized. The art centers everything, and makes the game stand out from the crowd. While it’s not massive in scope, goddamn is it a pleasure. You can beat the entire game on a lazy weekend. Players explore and slash their way through the world with their techno-sword, simultaneously reawakening dormant memories of the world’s creator in hopes of saving everything. Players find themselves as Narita Boy, a young video gamer sucked into a digital kingdom they must save from the corrupted HIM program and its army. It also asks what happens when that escape becomes a crutch, and when a person’s escapism enables grief to control them.ĭeveloped by Spain’s Studio Koba, Narita Boy is a “retro-futuristic 2D pixel game” with a narrative that feels like Neverending Story meets Tron, brought to you by Heavy Metal. It considers how stories and fantasy as a kid becomes an escape as grief piles on while we age. Narita Boy mulls over youth’s impact on adulthood and the art passed from one generation to the next. Narita Boy runs headlong into what makes both those story beats and nostalgia in general work while reflecting on it through the lens of pop culture a little more than, say, Ready Player One. The big budget blockbusters like Transformers or the Marvel Cinematic Universe are using Saturday morning heroes to put aging snake people in front of a screen to revisit memories from schooldays. Not to mention revisited IPs seeing new life after the ‘80s and early ’90s that feel inherently tied to childhood. , The Goonies– with newer pop culture like It and Stranger Things leaning into the same themes as it mines the decade for nostalgia. So many of the 1980s most enduring stories center on youth, its loss and growing up.
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