It’s not a secret cassette boy Inspired by the classics. It’s a top-to-bottom adventure game in retro style legend of zeldaWhile your home is a small town like an old town pokemon The game, complete with a mother who is constantly wishing you well. The game’s blocky 3D graphics pop minecraftAnd you save at a campfire that resets the world, just like in the Fromsoft game. Everything in cassette boy It even has a green color that reminds me of playing the game on my original Game Boy. But despite all the obvious influences, it still feels unique: beneath that flashy exterior, cassette boy It’s a game full of clever puzzles that forced me to use my brain in ways I never did before.
The game’s core mechanics revolve around an idea “inspired by quantum mechanics”: if you can’t see something in the game, it ceases to “exist” and remains in essentially a frozen state from the moment it goes off-screen. If you push a block behind a wall, it is no longer “there”, and you can walk behind that wall without being obstructed by the box. If an enemy goes completely behind a wall, he becomes invisible, will stop moving and will not be able to harm you. Since it doesn’t exist, you can’t even harm it. The game also lets you rotate the camera to eight different points; Imagine it’s on a compass, and by tapping the shoulder button, you can rotate it to the north “point,” then northwest, then east, etc. So, with that hidden enemy, if you rotate the camera so he’s not behind the wall, he “reappears” and becomes a physical creature again.
cassette The boy then sets up a set of puzzles that force you to mess with perspective in order to overcome obstacles. At the start, you’ll see a button that when pressed causes a platform to appear over the river, and the button is next to a boulder. everyone who played zelda The game knows that the normal solution is to press the button to move the boulder. But you can’t lift a boulder in cassette boy; Instead, the solution is to step on the button and then rotate the camera so that the boulder completely hides the pressed button. This way, the button freezes when pressed, allowing you to climb up the platform to get to the other side of the river.
In addition to moving the camera, you get tools like switches and a bow and arrow to attack enemies from a distance and cassette tapes that give you the power to see bombable walls or shoot you down. When it all comes together, cassette boy Really satisfying: When I was in the area, I couldn’t wait to take apart each new room to work on puzzles and discover treasures hidden away from sight. There are also clever battles against giant, blocky bosses to earn Moon Fragments (the main MacGuffin you’re tasked with finding).
However, sometimes, cassette boy May become frustrated. There are no maps to refer to. You often have to talk to exactly the right person at exactly the right time to advance the main quest, and you have no clue who they might be other than the speech bubble over their head. After you collect the moon piece, the game will send you back to the main town but won’t tell you where to go, so I often got frustrated having to find all the townspeople over and over again. Some puzzles completely baffled me, and I usually had a full-game walkthrough open during my roughly eight-hour playthrough to give me hints on how to proceed.
But I also think all this ambiguity is by design, and it’s reminiscent of the game’s inspirations. with elder zelda And pokemon game, I have fond memories of wandering around, getting lost, and eventually finding my way out with a sigh of relief. With all the time I spent fighting, I was forced to learn my way around those worlds, and I can now remember how to get through the hardest parts of those games, even though I haven’t played them in years. (Even developers breath of the wild Think getting lost can be a “very positive thing”.)
cassette boy Evokes that old school feeling. Even when it frustrated me, I generally didn’t care about the struggle and it helped me learn my way back. Generally, I realized that finding the right path forward simply required a new perspective.
cassette boy Available now on PC, PlayStation, Xbox and Nintendo Switch.
<a href