4/3/2023 0 Comments Narita boy perpetual glitchThe final nail in the coffin for me happened when I encountered a game-breaking bug that made me rage-quit. It makes platforming needlessly difficult. Platforming and navigating in Narita Boy feels like you’re sliding, or slipping on a banana peel. The jumping and platforming feel floaty, like Narita Boy moves too slowly or doesn’t jump high enough, or reacts just a split-second too slowly. That last statement probably needs some qualification. It feels floaty and stiff at the same time. Narita Boy’s gameplay is repetitive, stale, and often frustrating to play.įor one thing, the controls feel awkward. The mechanics of this game don’t do the superb visual and audio design justice. Get macguffin A, use it to unlock door B to area C, but not before slicing up a bunch of baddies in fight B-a. Gameplay wise, Narita Boy is pretty standard metroidvania, action platformer fare. Too Bad Narita Feels Awkward to Play and Gets Stale It gives Narita Boy a welcome – and much needed – layer of thematic depth. You see people playing the slaughter of their siblings in front of them on an infinite loop. You meet stable-masters who gouge out their face-screens and replace their sound receptors with loops of ambient music so they can’t see and hear the dying, rotting corpses of servo-horses around them. You meet people looking for their husbands, their brothers, and their families. You see bodies crucified and strung up on the walls with their digitized, pixelated innards dripping out. It feels like a setting moments after a horrific war crime took place. The world of the Digital Kingdom, the world the game takes place in and which you are meant to save, is permeated in loss and suffering. I was expecting a lighthearted and whimsical romp out of Narita Boy, but the game is actually very melancholy and takes some very abrupt, very dark turns. If you can manage to stomach through the initial adjustment period though, you’ll find Narita Boy pulling you in more and more. You get the sense that something really important is happening, but you don’t really know what. On top of that, the dialogue is often apocryphal and a little stilted. You can tell that the devs put a lot of work into building the lore of this world, which is frustrating because for a good third of the game I only had a hazy idea of what the hell was going on. It’s almost comical how entire religious sects in this world will worship a giant computer priest who bathes you in a blue beam of light as a modulated chorus of cyberangels escalates in the background just to give you a single piece of a code to enter into a door to the next room. The artists spent so much time on the background and environment art that you almost feel bad how little time you spend in some of them. Many of them contain their own unique set-piece, whether they’re pastures of electric sheep, or giant frogs with computer screens for faces. It gives you so much to look at that you want to spend every minute examining every detail.Įach screen of the game has its own unique name e.g. It is absolutely bursting with visual creativity. Narita Boy is an action platformer made by Barcelona-based STUDIO KOBA and published by Team17. It’s nothing short of a tragedy that it’s not that fun to actually play. This is a triumph of the cyberpunk genre. The set pieces, art and animation will inspire you and make you dream of digital worlds beyond possibility. The story of Narita Boy will feed your imagination and touch the depths of your soul. It’s a story of an epic hero’s journey to save a civilization from a warped, destructive hive mind, while also being a story about how one man created a fantasy world to process his grief and overwhelming loss. This is a game that can only be described as a cyberilliad.
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