Disney Illusion Island

One of my mistakes in 2025 was that I bought too many games. The only solution is to keep clearing the backlog, by going through the quicker ones first. Gotta start somewhere!

Disney Illusion Island, developed by Dlala Studios, was first released on the Nintendo Switch on July 28th, 2023. It was then released to other platforms (PS5, PC, Xbox) on May 30th, 2025. I found the Switch version in the wild, it looked fun, and there I was, with one more game. I’m incorrigible. But hey, it’s Disney and it’s got a cool art style, so why not. The game’s name is a reference to Mickey Mouse’s Castle of Illusion on SEGA systems and its follow-ups. But this time, we can play as Mickey, Minnie, Donald or Goofy – or up to all four at once!

Heroes Wanted

Our game begins as Mickey makes his way to a picnic destination on an island, indicated by a map sent by Minnie. Or so he thinks. After he’s found the spot, he’s joined by Minnie, who says HE sent her a map to this spot. Donald and Goofy, who were also sent maps, show up. All four are puzzled, so they investigate a twinkling sound coming from a nearby area.

Someone wanted all four of them there, but why?
(Thanks to Gamer's Little Playground for the playthrough,
which I am picking my screenshots from.)

Ah yes! Toku, the benevolent quest giver! Disregard the
eye twitch, totally normal benevolent response to annoyance.

They trace the sound to a red bush, and after crossing it they find a large library with an open bookcase. They are greeted by furred creatures known as the Hokuns and their leader, Toku, who welcomes them to the magical world of Monoth. Toku is the one who sent the maps, as he needs their help. Donald is enraged to find out there won’t be a picnic, but the team stays and listens. Toku explains that the three magical tomes of their bookcase have gone missing, stolen by three thieves inhabiting the three biomes of Monoth, and this could endanger their world. The Hokun doesn’t seem to know that the Mickey cartoons are in-universe fictions, in which the group only pretends to be heroes – but Mickey and his friends agree to try and be real heroes for once.

ZOMBI

For once, on Halloween, I wanted to be on topic! At the start of the year, I select which games I might like to play across the following 12 months, and back at the start of 2025, I had two horror picks in my list; today’s game, and Resident Evil 4 on the Wii. I will try to cover the latter in November – however, for now, I have Ubisoft’s zombie game to get through. I can’t chicken out of this!

Uh oh, here comes the horde.

Ubisoft has many famous series, but also quite a few standalone games. Today’s title was first released as a Wii U launch title, with the title ZombiU, in November 2012; but then it was given a second life as a port made by Straight Right, retitled ZOMBI, and released on PlayStation 4, Xbox One and PC on August 18th, 2015. Although… calling it a “second life” may be a little gauche; we are talking about survival in a zombie apocalypse here. This game is known for doing something never seen before – fresh, new ideas, those are rare nowadays, especially those that directly affect gameplay. Enough beating around the bush, let’s see what this is all about.

London has Fallen

Well, can't say it's a great living arrangement, but...
it's not like there are better options right now.

The zombie apocalypse is underway. Your survivor is surrounded by undead, but a voice from the metro PA tells them to run into the station. They race through and end up in a Safe House designed by their new friend, the Prepper, who will help them survive. Out of the goodness of his heart, sure, let’s go with that. Before the survivor can go on missions, they need to get a weapon – a cricket bat – and a Bug-Out Bag (BOB), with room for the survival tools they’ll gather. You also get a handgun, with limited ammunition (for survival horror, that’s par for the course). Finally, you get a Prepper Pad, which scans the area and detects anything of interest: Dead bodies, containers, doors, hidden items. Scanning doors with this can often allow the Prepper to hack them and open the way for your protagonist. Similarly, scanning security cameras can reveal the map in their areas.

Your first mission is to scan a grocery store’s CCTVs at Brick Lane Markets. After getting a key card, you gain access to London's sewer system, which serves as quick travel between areas. Be careful when you explore, though; your only save points are beds, and though you can find some aside from the one in the Safe House, those are few and far between.

Zombies, if you come back, you get the whack!

Quick Review: Spaceport Hope

A courier investigating a strange, multi-planet conspiracy!

Just the first blood. Slugs are great first enemies.

Developed by team BitClub, published by them and Sunken Treasure Games, and released on April 15th, 2016, Spaceport Hope is a platforming action shooter with very light Metroidvania elements. Your character is a courier (…no name given, who cares about names anyway), and he lives in a town on a planet led by a nebulous Government that seems to also rule over several planets in the system. At the beginning of the game, he is tasked with delivering a crate of medicine to the Spaceport Hope space station. However, the load turns out to be contaminated by radiations, which gets the hero in trouble. To clean his record, he must escape, investigate the situation, and find the true culprits. This adventure will take him to every planet and make him encounter pirates, hackers, and perhaps even worse.

"Shoot till their HP falls to 0." Easy to do with the base gun.
Also, monster, alien, animal, or just some random human
doing their job (that involves shooting back at you), no
matter! Shoot to kill either way!

The controls: The arrows to move, A to jump (with the ability to double jump), S to shoot. Q and W to cycle between weapons, E to interact with stuff. F to open the inventory of items, and G to open the weapon menu and toggle which guns to add to the weapon cycle. You can always shoot upwards, and downward while in midair. Your starter gun has infinite ammunition, and you find new weapons over time, with plenty of ammo lying around to reload.

A big dinosaur with poisonous spikes in the metro
tunnels. Just another day in this solar system.

Enemies don’t show health on screen as a bar that gradually decreases; instead, when you hit an enemy, a number flashes showing how much health it has left. That’s for regular enemies; bosses have the classic health bar. Most enemies and bosses have gimmicks we’ve seen before, but I can let that slide personally. The game isn’t easy per se, it’s very easy to land in a situation with too many enemies and you never have so much HP as to feel comfortable for too long. Thankfully, save points serve as respawns, and they heal the Hero anytime he touches them – but they’re also sparse enough that going back to them can be tricky.

Dangerous laboratories? Sure. Hey, I'm trying to make sense
of a situation in which I was framed, I'll visit every place that
can help me!

The Metroidvania side? While it’s among the keywords for the game, that aspect is underutilized. You never really upgrade your base abilities to access new areas, and thus you rarely have reasons to return to previous dungeons. You will be coming back to previous areas occasionally, but it will usually be because the plot opened a new dungeon in the area. A few moments do require the Hero to purchase (or find) items beforehand – like scuba-diving gear to visit an underwater dungeon, or a gas mask to bypass a wall of poisonous gas. But you’ll gather enough money from killing enemies and looting chests that getting those items shouldn’t be an issue.

Some boss battles get pretty tough, like when they have a
weak point that doesn't show up frequently. Like this guy.

As soon as you can travel through space, you have access to several minor dungeons with a handful of extras to look for, like additional health and other items you can use to get deeper into the game. You’ll also often find data to access other planets, so there are indeed pans of this universe that you won’t see until you’ve gotten to that point in the story.

Gotta love those ledge-camping enemies that foirce you to
juml in place shooting till they're dead, 'cause if you touch
them you'll get hurt.

Is Spaceport Hope amazing? Nah. Is it bad? …Not at all, actually! It ranks firmly in the “okay bordering on good” category. It doesn’t set out to break any ground and reinvent its genre; it just features very common gameplay elements, but executes them well. There’s variety in the enemies and bosses you can encounter, with many of them requiring specific strategies to deal with. You can find a decent choice of weapons, difficulty progression is steady (though, genre-wise, it feels purely like a shooter platformer and the Metroidvania aspect is barely there). I didn’t run into any gameplay issues, everything worked right. The sprite art is pretty good, and the music is alright. The story is generic, but not terrible. In short: Not a must-play, but its quality and its low price make it plenty accessible if you’re looking for another run’n’gun-like platformer.

Spaceport Hope is available on Steam for 1.99$ USD.

Quick Review: Shantae: Half-Genie Hero

She’s back, and ready to defend Scuttle Town again!

If we're starting with the downtown on fire... We're in for
something good.

WayForward’s Shantae series has quite a few games; I covered another one, Risky's Revenge, long ago. The entry covered today, Shantae: Half-Genie Hero, was released on December 20th, 2016 after a successful Kickstarter campaign. However, in place of a Metroidvania-style, interconnected world, we have a game split into stages. Most of them contain secrets inaccessible until Shantae collects the right abilities and forms to turn into (through her belly dancing, of course). You can return later to find those and expand your arsenal.

Factories? Mermaids? Crocodiles? Better investigate this.
I'm supposed to be looking for maidens, not mermaids!

After another attack from Risky Boots and her pirate crew on Scuttle Town, Shantae’s elderly inventor uncle begins making a machine, using old blueprints, that will protect the town in her place. However, she'll need to find the items he needs. And solve problems across the land, while she’s at it. Maidens are disappearing in the next town over? Everyone in Scuttle Town loses their memories and another half-genie looks like the culprit? Stopping a heist at the grand flying carpet race? Other than her uncle’s machine, what could tie these things together? Maybe the occasional dream Shantae has been having of the genie world, which speaks to her…

We're gonna need a bigger boat. ...Okay, that joke
is probably in poor taste to talk about a giant mermaid.

Wham! Need power to push large blocks? Become elephant.
Stay cute either way.

With the jewels you collect, you can buy additional upgrades for Shantae, such as magic spells to use (with the C key), or improvements to the attack power and speed of her hair whip. Over the course of this adventure, she regains her classic forms – the wall-climbing monkey, the ramming elephant, the swimming mermaid, and so on. Some forms have a secondary ability must be unlocked by finding it. As an example, the mermaid form starts out defenseless against underwater threats, but Shantae later learns to shoot bubbles to attack.

Uh oh, gotta escape the giant worm (which is dead when we
return, so yep, can't "finish" this area in one go).

Splitting the game into stages, each with lots of secrets, does help in some capacity. However, it means you’ll be revisiting eqch stage many, many times to find new abilities that were previously impossible to get. You do gain access to teleportation tools to quickly leave a stage once you got what you wanted, or to warp directly to the next area if you know exactly what you're looking for and where it's located.

Past the main mode, you can play the game again with various twists: A Hero Mode with all transformations unlocked from the start, a Hardcore Mode, and a Jammies Mode with Shantae in her pajamas and fighting with her pillow (yup). The store page includes DLCs for two additional quests, one playing Risky Boots’ side of the story, another playing as Shantae’s friends, and three “costumes” that come with their own arcade-like gameplay!

In Jammies Mode (implied to be one big dream), her pillow
atrtacxk is somehow stronger than her regular hair whip.
Also, this mode turns the game into a genuine platformer.

Some of these quests feel like a point'n'click. You obtain the
candy from the dotor, which you see after getting sick, which
happens after finding five relics for an archaeologist in the
desert tower, and finding said relics requires the ability to
ground-pound with the elephant form. ...Phew!

WayForward knows how to craft a good Metroidvania – as proven repeatedly by this very franchise. But if you bought Shantae: Half-Genie Hero hoping for one, you might be disappointed that it's split into stages rather than being a continuous world, even if the spirit remains and the game is still very good. As pointed above, this change does lead to some degree of repetitiveness, though there's a few workarounds. As usual, this is paired by a great soundtrack, a beautiful hand-drawn art style (seriously, the game looks awesome), and inventive stages and bosses with always something new to discover. It’s worth checking out for fans of the genre or of the series. Good time all around.

Shantae: Half-Genie Hero is available on Steam for 19.99$ USD. Or, alternately, you can get the Ultimate edition released two years later, in May 2018, which includes all the bonus material.

Quick Review: Headlander

Talk about a head-ache!

In the future, everything will be plug-and-play.
Even body-critical technology. USBs? Too complicated.

Developed by Double Fine Productions, published by Adult Swim Games and released on July 26th, 2016, Headlander is… well, it’s Double Fine, so it’s weird. Someone awakens on a space station, to realize they are nothing except a head in a space helmet. Bodies are so last millennium. Even worse, they are the last flesh and blood human in the universe, since the rest of mankind has long transferred their consciousnesses into "Impostor" robot bodies to attain immortality. And all the places where these Impostor bodies live are controlled by the all-seeing powerful AI known as Methuselah.

In this screenshot, my character is in the bottom left, using
an orange body - stronger than red. Still gotta deal with
the lasers from the other guards...

Any hopes of saving humanity? In this world inspired by how the ‘60s imagined the future, your helmet can plug ("Headland") into any body without a head (using Q) and take control of it. Can’t find a body without a head? Activate the vacuum (Left-click) and pull the head off a body yourself to steal it! You can use the vacuum feature to pull out all sorts of things, granting access to computers, passageways, and more. It's a Metroidvania, so you gradually unlock abilities that allow you to go further. You can collect multicolored energy that fills up a gauge, granting skill points when full; these can be spent in the menu to unlock or improve abilities. Progress is also locked behind color coding, as many doors are locked unless you control a body of the appropriate color. The armed guards in the second area, as an example, are usually red, and you need to take their bodies to walk through red doors. But then, orange and yellow doors later appear.

Hmm. Orange... Yellow... yeah, let's go for yellow.

When lasers start flying left and right and everywhere - oh
yeah, it gets hard to avoid them all. Good luck moving that
frail robot body around...

The guards are equipped with laser weapons that you can then use against other guards and threats. Lasers bounce off walls, floors and ceilings, and you can use that to your advantage to hit enemies – but they, too, can do it to hit you. Your arsenal expands over time to include melee attacks, greater vacuum pull allowing you to rip the heads off robot bodies from greater distances, a thrust that can transform your flying head into a cannonball, force shields that can be used to bypass lasers, and so much more. As a Metroidvania, the interest is to explore every nook and cranny to find secrets and upgrades, and to return when new abilities (or bodies) are discovered. The plot is split into chapters, with teleporters (sorry, “zap pads”) between areas, so you can go back without having to trek the whole way through. The robot bodies can be frail against enemy lasers, even after upgrades to health regeneration, so those pads are much appreciated.

Found another secret area with a health boost! You bet
I'll take it - the lasers are only getting stronger in every area!

Speaking of the "chess" game,  wait till you see the Queen.
Now THAT's a boss fight I wasn't expecting.

And of course, this is Double Fine we’re talking about, so the absurd concept is delivered with a very tongue-in-cheek writing and a lot of sarcastic characters (especially the doors when they tell you that you’re in the wrong body to move ahead – they're called R.O.O.D., that says it all). The silly concepts somehow lead into an intriguing story that keeps you invested regardless. And they have fun with it, too; one chapter even includes a twisted version of chess with lasers (…don’t question it), and one game of it must be infiltrated to steal sensitive data. the concept lends itself to a lot of special challenges, such as when you’re forced to plug into specific bodies to progress, as an example.

It's a crazy ride, a solid Metroidvania with an excellent eye for aesthetics. It's worth checking out, whether you like the genre or the slightly more comedic tone.

Headlander is available on Steam for …..

Quick Review: Youropa

Ooh, I’ve always wanted to visit Paris! Maybe not like that, though.

We're actually upside-down right now!

A creation of frecle released on June 27th, 2018, Youropa is about Paris tearing apart and taking to the skies. Our character, a humanoid white shape all covered in paint, finds itself in the ensuing mess, and must find its way around the floating pieces of land, while dealing with all the strange gravity-based happenings. The paint on your character is also its health bar, and you can see it fall away anytime it gets hurt, falls, or gets splashed with water.

We're gonna kick some balls. Hey, this IS set in Europe,
we just have to play football. (That's how they call soccer.)

Gravity is… strange. The direction of the character's gravity is entirely tied to the floor they’re walking on. If you moved from the ground to a wall thanks to a round floor, its gravity changes accordingly. If, however, you step off a ledge, you’ll become subject to normal gravity (read: pulled downwards), no matter what your current orientation is. If you’re upside-down? Part of the game is keeping in mind how gravity affects you relative to the world. Thankfully, you can press the mouse wheel to get a full view of the mass you’re on (and in which orientation you are – to know where “below” is), and to press the alt key to see a map of the game world and where to go next.

The chunks of Paris are lovely this time of year.

When it comes to abilities, all you can do at first is walk around. You gradually unlock new skills, like grabbing items or kicking them, both needed to solve later puzzles and defeat enemies. Midway into the game, our character learns to jump. Even later, they learn to run by holding down Shift. Further down the line, they finally can stick to walls in the middle of jumps.

Did anyone catch the number of the bus that
ran me over?

There are little touches that give the game some flavor; if you land after falling from too high, the character is dazed and regains consciousness by you clicking the mouse five times, shown around its head like circling birdies. You can change your character’s look while standing on spots that serve as spawn points; alternately, you can get splashed by paint from cans lying around. You can even pick up spray cans and paint statues or graffiti walls. Finally, every level contains three pink tape cassettes. It’s a bonus challenge to find them all. The Eiffel Tower area has ten of those.

Considering you die if the paint is completely washed off
your body... yeah, rain's bad!

I mentioned that the character’s health bar is represented by the paint on their body, which peels off as they get hurt; so yes, you can get a Game Over in this game, but all it does is that you reappear at the latest spawn point, the same you would have reappeared at if you had just fallen off the stage. If there isn’t a greater penalty for a Game Over than there is for losing health, why bother?

The game comes with a level editor, for which you unlock new pieces with every pink cassette you find, as well as a Challenge Mode that opens when you beat the story and reach the top of the Eiffel tower, putting Paris back together in one piece as a result.

There's also the occasional gameplay change, with
moments where we use cars, pogo sticks, bicycles...

Design away! (An "erase" button would have been nice.)

As far as puzzle platformers go, this is about as straightforward as it gets; its main issue is that in a genre oversaturated by gravity-based gameplay, Youropa struggles to set itself apart. It does so in the details – the inexplicable plot of having to reassemble a city and its most famous landmark, and the paint-based elements. The first hour is kinda dull, boiling down to walking around the maps as we lack every other skill, with only the pretty sights and the mind-screwy gravity to make it interesting. The camera often shifts on its own, which isn’t great; but it’s nice that we can look at a stage from afar to find new details. The bonus features and occasional changes in gameplay are pretty cool, too.

(To be honest, maybe I’m just burnt out on puzzle platformers after covering so many, but I don’t want that to reflect negatively on Youropa; it’s not the game’s fault.)

Youropa is available on Steam for 14.99$ USD. It’s also on Switch.

Quick Review: Hot Tin Roof: The Cat That Wore A Fedora

When your previous job doesn’t work out, career redirection is a-okay.

We're here to investigate! P.S. Your guard
on ground floor is a jerk.

Made by Glass Bottom Games and released on February 20th, 2015 following a successful Kickstarter campaign, Hot Tin Roof: The Cat That Wore A Fedora is a sequel to their previous game, Jones on Fire, reviewed here last year. We have a complete shift in genre, the total opposite of the endless runner the previous entry was. We follow Emma Jones again, and after the Firestorm that she rescued so many cats from, society has retrieved a semblance of normalcy. Even if it meant rebuilding over the charred remains of the previous world. Since firefighting isn’t so necessary now, Jones became a private investigator, helped by the fedora-wearing cat Francine (Franky).

We have here an odd combo of genres. At first, we could think this game is a platformer, due to how Jones plays; but it's more of a Metroidvania. We also have an aspect of an adventure game, as we interrogate suspects, pick up clues, and present those clues to relevant people. Our first investigation involves the robbery of a will at the Ossified Egg. Tied to this is the discovery of a dead body at the Slice of Pi eatery. Then there’s the mystery of Franky’s past, which she’s not interested in sharing.

Nifty platforming, but there's a lot of places where Franky
struggles to follow Jones around.

Jones wields her weapon of choice, the “Wobbly MK 2/3”, which adapts to weird ammo. None of her bullets can kill, but all come with special effects. The starter ones can just destroy stuff like boxes. Then, as we progress, we find: Bubbles that reveal hidden things; bullets that turn this gun into a grapple hook; fire bullets that destroy some items and light up areas; knockback rounds, which can push heavy items or send Jones upwards; and gumdrops that explode when lit up (don’t ask).

This thing comes in bullet form now? I'm struggling to
"grapple" with the concept.

This dungeon, even lower than the underground, is packed
with nuclear toxic vines that trap you in place.
That's good, I was feeling too safe from radiation lately.

We visit three “dungeons” with platforming puzzles to solve and discover these weapons, allowing Jones and Franky to explore more areas. The dungeons can be tricky to explore; several rooms force you to use your tools to the maximum. Our goal is still to figure out the means, motive and opportunity of each crime, which allows us to ask our Chief for search warrants to get into places we can’t enter otherwise (or can, if we figure out an alternate path), or arrest warrants once we’ve figured out the culprits.

It's also a good idea to read the clues you've found, as
they update as you find information.

Featuring box-shaped people and both cats and rodents that talk a lot (and love to snark), the tone of the game is somewhere between classic noir and referential, parodic self-awareness. Lots of comedic moments. Either way, expect unexpected twists. I’ll fully admit that I wasn’t feeling much at first, but the plot eventually won me over. There’s a decent amount of challenge here, and in true Metroidvania fashion, we need to revisit past areas to find more secrets and get the best ending; but also, the multiple endings all have achievements attached to them, encouraging one to replay the game to get the others.

The camera angles I discuss in the next paragraph. Goes from
a 2D moving one axis, to 2D moving another axis. The idea,
while fine, leads to risks of getting stuck as the camera
won't work anymore if you activate some specific stuff
while in that view.

That big-ass castle in the Dump? I tried everything. You
can't go in it. Come on, you put something that large in a
significant area of the game, and there's no way to enter?
We also never find the perfect gift for our girlfriend working
at Slice of Pi, nor can we ever discover the Chief's
true name. Pieces are missing!!

I don’t have a lot of critiques to make, really; due to its odd 2D side-scrolling system applied to a 3D layout, venturing the world is confusing at first, in part as it achieves such a thing by playing with camera angles. It takes some getting used to. Once or twice, I activated something mid-camera swap, got stuck, and had to close the game from Steam and resume from a save point (which are bathrooms). Not the only glitch, but others were just minor stuff. You can manually reload the gun on a screen that opens when you press R, which also allows you to switch between ammo – but in that case, you also need to reload the gun yourself, which gets tedious at the end when you swap regularly between the various types of ammo to solve puzzles. You can also hold down R to reload instantly, but there’s still no quick way to swap between ammo types. There’s a bit of leniency in difficulty as there are ways to get advice as to where to go next, when stuck. To top it off, there are plot threads still unsolvable due to hopes of these elements being added later, which hasn’t been done.

Overall, a decent idea and combo of genres, I had a good time, but it’s very much unpolished and could have spent a bit more time being tested and improved. Still, it’s fine, so if you’re looking for something unusual, it might be up your alley.

Hot Tin Roof: The Cat That Wore A Fedora is available on Steam for 14.99$ USD.

Quick Review: Wonder Boy: The Dragon's Trap

Not often do I get to play games from SEGA consoles – or remakes of them.

This dragon is going down! ...I hope.

Wonder Boy III: The Dragon’s Trap was originally a game developed by Westone and released on the Sega Master System in 1989. Today’s game is a remake of that title, this time developed by Lizardcube, published by Dotemu and released to Steam on June 8th, 2017. The most notable change in design may be the use of hand-drawn scenery and sprites. The intention was otherwise to stay as true to the original Wonder Boy title as possible – so aside from a few quality of life upgrades, much of the remake should play the same.

Well, this is a strange turn of events...
Good thing I adapt well!

The story to this one directly follows the previous installment in the Wonder Boy series, even opening like the other would have ended: As the fully-equipped hero, we make our way through the final dungeon, with a lot of health and such high attack and defense that the enemies are trivial. We get to the “final boss” and, while tough, we beat him. Surprise! This dragon had the power to inflict curses, and in its dying breath, transformed our hero into a weak fire-spewing lizard. Their quest, now, is all about finding some way to undo this curse and retrieve their human body. The only logical way to do that is to defeat the other dragons, withstand their curses, and amass abilities to find the cure!

The gameplay has the basics with some interesting twists. Move around with the arrows, jump with X, do a sword slash with Z (I usually switch those two around in the options) and use a special attack with C. Those attacks can be picked up from enemies that are felled, and used up afterwards – they include a boomerang, a fireball, an arrow shooting upwards and a bolt of lightning (will harms all enemies on the screen). We swap between these options with A and S.

Running up that pole, running up that column.
Why is the mouse outfitted with wall stickiness?
I really don't know.

Yeowch! Hey! Stop walking into me! My
invincibility frames and "Ow!" sprite won't
go away till you let go of me!

We have hearts at the top of the screen, but don’t go think those deplete by halves and quarters like in other franchises; no, they’re more like a fancy way to show an HP bar. What do I mean by this? Well, as we progress through the game, we can buy swords and armor that will increase the character’s attack and defense respectively. Almost like RPG mechanics in a platformer. The higher the character’s defense, the less the hearts will deplete from the same attack. Some weapons and armor also come with bonus abilities.

You can play as a lion too? Best game ever!

The other major gameplay element is the curses themselves, as each one grants new abilities to our hero. Their lizard form can breathe fire; the second one, a tiny mouse, can run up walls and ceilings; the third one, a humanoid piranha, can swim; and there are more. The game is built so that no character can get stuck badly. We also get the occasional upgrade to our skills. While not purely linear (as you can explore a fair bit of the map at any time), progression is limited based on the form and abilities you have. Late in the game, you become able to switch between your hero’s collected forms at will.

Also of note: Choosing at the start to play as either Wonder Bor or Wonder Girl (even if the human form sticks around for all of 5 minutes); difficulty levels from Casual to Hard; and the possibility to play the game in the original 8bit.

There's even a small handful of extras added to
this version that weren't in the Master System
title.

I had to travel half the world to get to this
place. I better get some cool stuff out of it.

The hand-drawn art makes this game a treat to watch as you play, with lots of detail in every area. The soundtrack, which takes the chiptune tracks of the original and updates them with real instruments, is highly enjoyable as well. Gameplay is pretty solid, with multiple options for attacks as well as special abilities for each form – the one downside is that when you get stuck with a new form, you have to get used to its features. Not so bad for most of them, but I remember struggling with the mouse’s wall climb and its sword the size of a friggin’ toothpick, I swear. Lots of rewards can be found through exploration as well. There’s a number of gameplay flaws lifted from the title it remakes, such as the lack of checkpoints, our sword’s hitbox, some physics, and (the worst in my opinion) how the game handles invincibility frames after getting hit, often trapping the player in an inescapable series of blows while they stand there in their “hurt” sprite.

Putting those flaws aside, if the goal was to be faithful to the original game, then that’s a success – and the game is still pretty fun and engaging.

Wonder Boy: The Dragon’s Trap is available on Steam for 19.99$ USD.