![]() It added hours to my playthrough, but I wouldn’t have survived the back-and-forth without indulging in map making. Drawing these maps became the highlight of my gameplay. I was so lost by the second level that I didn’t have a choice. No, you don’t have to draw maps to get through Narita Boy. I don’t even own a pencil, let alone an eraser, so I started drawing maps in pen, complete with mistakes and wrong turns and, frankly, bad enough penmanship that it wouldn’t be helpful if another player tried to use my screenshot as some kind of guide. To get through Narita Boy, what I had to draw were those functionally ugly lines-connecting-squares kinds of maps. When the map wasn’t some pretty game box pack-in burned into cloth. ![]() I think the last time I drew a map was back in the Sierra adventure game days. Until I figured out once again, in the year 2021, how to draw a map. I stumbled across forward progress accidentally as much as on purpose. For as many blinking, pointing fingers and arrow signs as there are, they only felt moderately helpful. Was I backtracking because I missed something, or backtracking because I got the keycard to a door 10 screens away? It was getting harder and harder to tell. There’s so much back-and-forth in the levels, too. Nail the climb or take the fall of shame. Lose your grip on a slippery set of wall jumps, and it’ll feel like Narita Boy is Getting Over It With Bennett Foddy. When it comes to verticality, Narita Boy reminded me why I dislike up and down exploration in side-scrollers. I moved around better on my Macintosh horse or on my 3.5-inch floppy disk hoverboard much better than I ever got around on my feet. The only thing I never got the hang of was the platforming. Glad from face-melting pixel art that has to be seen to be believed. ![]() Frustrated by too many words that should’ve been hit harder by a copy editor. At the same time, I was glad I was stopped every few seconds. I was frustrated by being stopped every few seconds. Every vocab word you ever learned in Computing 101 is here.īut every screen is screenshot-worthy. Twilight lens flare greets me at the Summit of the Perpetual Glitch. Red, yellow, and blue beams shoot out of the digital priests’ faces in the Techno-Algorithm Hall. I pass twitchy sheep grazing the Binary Pastures. Every pixelated screen is a glossary of computer programmer words. Only later does it cut you loose and let the gameplay do the talking.īut I’m quickly over Her Royal Verbosity as the digital decay of this CRT kingdom flip flops between chalky opacity and epileptic fits of flashing lights. Narita Boy introduces its world with stuttering steps. Narita Boy, however, is afraid you’ll miss all the neon signposts if you aren’t stopped in your tracks every few seconds to talk over your mission objectives again. A game like Hyper Light Drifter, to compare and contrast, is celebrated for its wordless world building. Everything is a capital-M Metaphor in Narita Boy. And yes, there’s a mother figure named Motherboard. That didn’t require a repeating 5,000-word monologue from you, Motherboard. For instance, I needed to collect 12 totems. If you go into Narita Boy expecting a top-to-bottom Metroidvania, you’re in for a surprise with how much lore you’ll be reading. ![]() Then the platforming and hacking and slashing and near-JRPG-amounts of dialogue either grew on me or the Stockholm Syndrome fully set in, and I ended up pushing hard towards the end game. For story, there is a father-son tale set inside a ham-fisted hall of memories and a lorebook that reads more like a glossary of computer terms. For action, it’s a hack n’ slasher that’s a little bit stingy with its slashing. He did it all, I have to mention, to a sick technowave soundtrack worth every dollar as a separate purchase.įor movement, Narita Boy is a side-scrolling platformer that wants you to hate its platforming. Behind aviator shades and a cop mustache, the Creator stayed up dark days and bright nights, pounding away at his keyboard, building the Digital Kingdom one red/yellow/blue beam of light at a time. Like in Ready Player One, there’s a Creator. And if Narita Boy had launched a few years earlier, he would’ve had a cameo in Ready Player One. Especially if those things are the ego-fueled equivalent of a 14-year-old living out a Tron-loving power fantasy.
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