Narita Boy
PC, PS4, Switch, Xbox One
We’ll say this: it’s a heck of a fur coat, at least. If you think you’ve seen everything pixel art has to offer – that after decades of experimentation the number of possible permutations of coloured dots has at last been exhausted – Narita Boy will prove you wrong. This is a remarkably attractive game, one that, while in clear creative hock to the ’80s, brings past aesthetics right up to modern standards, and then some. This is no mere retro pastiche, though there’s certainly plenty of that about it. Developer Studio Koba clearly takes its craft seriously.
A little too seriously, perhaps. Narita Boy’s story, while notionally a straightforward tale of a fictional videogame whose virtual world is infested with a virus, is simply overwritten: the game’s opening salvo is a minutes-long expository text dump, and things hardly improve from there. For every time we nudge the screenshot button to memorialise some stunning CRT-filtered sci-fi vista, we do so twice for another overwrought piece of dialogue. You’re talking to bits of computer code, so perhaps you can forgive them a lack of personality. But lord, they don’t half go on.
Narita Boy’s verbosity plays a key role in its poor pacing, but it is hardly acting alone. Levels seem to have been designed to maximise the time you spend traversing them – head all the way left for the key that unlocks the door all the way to the right, which in turn lets you go up to the top for the doodad you need to open the portal back at the start. Combat should cleanse the palate, but also seems balanced with longevity at top of mind. Basic grunts require five hits from your Techno-Sword to dispatch, and while your toolset grows over time – with such genre stalwarts as a shoulder bash, a ground slam and an uppercut – the enemy threat scales up accordingly, such that you never feel like you’re getting appreciably stronger.
Wildfire, a mechanic that lets Narita Boy power himself up with one of three coloured auras, drastically buffs his damage output, but raises incoming damage as well. That’s a dangerous game to play when fights span multiple waves of enemies, when incoming attacks and enemy states are often hard to read amid all the flashy effects, and when dying means doing it all over again.
That aesthetic really is powerful, though, and does more than enough to pull you through the game’s flatter moments. The desire to see what Studio Koba’s artists have dreamed up for the next section – and to hear what composer Salvador ‘Salvinsky’ Fornieles has worked up for the dreamy electro soundtrack – remains strong until the credits roll. If only there was substance to match the undeniable style.