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. 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 developer Studio Koba’s case, that futility of escape looks to have been taken to its logical conclusion. 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. Where someone from our world is beckoned, possibly against their will, into theirs. But just from the player’s experience alone: the game superimposed as if itself is transmitting from a near four decade-old screen. Edges bending as the clarity of Narita Boy’s mysterious setting is a wash with many an applied filter. Less you’re playing the hero in this world, more you’re playing the person actually controlling the hero.
I’ll give it to Studio Koba and Narita Boy: it’s a bold move. Especially so given it’s an aesthetic one – the kind that doesn’t heighten or benefit the gameplay. And at worst, can do more harm than good. 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. 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. 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. Or even that that same care and passion for detail hasn’t, sadly, reached the pause screen and accompanying menus.
Clearly 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 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. Because it’s the latter point, that acknowledgment of its own reference points – and the need to not take things too seriously – where Narita Boy may in fact keep players invested. If not for the backstory of the game world’s alleged creator, where players waltz on through elaborate sequences of vague flash-backs we’re sure to be piecing together at convenient points throughout.
Even if it’s something as simple as the fact your player-character’s charged attack – wielding the mythic blade of its associated cyber setting – is used more as a baseball than a blade. Small details like this show Studio Koba, in all their indulgence, aren’t losing themselves entirely to the reality that there’s still one other person here along for the ride: the player. The visual presentation is attractive, gorgeous even at points with its fusing of rocky surroundings, grand chapel-esque halls and retro circuitry. Even if that does come at the cost of key moments that may need a little more clarity as to what exactly is interactive in the platforming department and what isn’t. Access to a chamber that could be mistaken as simply another piece of furnishing and ignored. Story objectives that are in dire need of a world map, above all else. Even a boss health meter that isn’t some vague representation of such and instead, pure and simply, an actual bar.
It’s less a lack of foresight on the basics, more the slightest of distraction by way of a world that, to its credit, Narita Boy is wanting to draw you into. Much like its lone hero – now a similar aberration of pixels in a richly-pixelated realm trying to be both mythical and a touch comical at times. And strangely enough, the game looks to have pulled off (on paper) the more difficult element of a game of this ilk. The concern is in just how much that eagerness to please, to appease more so – that presentation, that same fond recalling of the 80s in all its many aesthetic boxes to be ticked – begins to work against, rather than in conjunction with, the mechanics of its gameplay. And at an even simpler level: how easy, or hard, it may be to work out just what is what in this world, its backlog of lore notwithstanding. But there’s more good over bad here – a fond hope as much a tempered kind of intrigue for Narita Boy to pull through on its more-than-self-aware indulging on 80’s flair.
