![]() Even so, perhaps easing players into the setting would’ve been a better-suited approach here than simply unloading it all, out of some fear maybe that we’d either forget or just not care. Or even that that same care and passion for detail hasn’t, sadly, reached the pause screen and accompanying menus.Ĭlearly Narita Boy has a story it wants to tell and a world it shows sincere effort in ensuring you’re convinced is fleshed out. Even if the former case feels too expository and potentially convoluted with the sheer number of name-drops, terminology and the like dumped on the player in the literal starting area. Studio Koba do at least look to be committing to the idea of a setting that is evidently swimming in its own ethereal-like lore, but having fun at its own self-referential get-up, with little if any cost to its immersion. When talk of clarity is predominantly around the hope one can play a game without feeling like we’ve accidentally knocked the blur dial a touch. And at worst, can do more harm than good. Especially so given it’s an aesthetic one - the kind that doesn’t heighten or benefit the gameplay. I’ll give it to Studio Koba and Narita Boy: it’s a bold move. Less you’re playing the hero in this world, more you’re playing the person actually controlling the hero. Edges bending as the clarity of Narita Boy‘s mysterious setting is a wash with many an applied filter. But just from the player’s experience alone: the game superimposed as if itself is transmitting from a near four decade-old screen. ![]() Where someone from our world is beckoned, possibly against their will, into theirs. And not just in the promotional art that clearly evokes cultural cornerstones like Tron - in all the same fantastical imagining of cyberspace as a living, breathing, sentient realm all its own. In developer Studio Koba’s case, that futility of escape looks to have been taken to its logical conclusion. From the aberrational use of color, to the retro envisioning of future times, to even the abundance of analog synthesizers used by musicians the world over, there’s no escaping the reminiscing on “times gone” and times yet to experience with a game like Narita Boy. In case you’ve been living under a rock these past few years, a revivalist obsession with the ’80s is afoot in many a medium, video games being one of them. ![]()
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