Monster Boy and the Cursed Kingdom Reviews

Don't be fooled by the cheerful art and music. This game wants to piss you off with its infuriating platforming and constant softlock locations in just the normal course of play. Gave up after the third softlock at about 33% completion. [h1]The Good[/h1] +Cute, colorful, well-animated +Great music +Equipment usually visible on your character +Frequent save points and no real penalty for death anyway +Shortcuts marked on map with dotted lines +Bosses have decent mechanics and can be learned without repeated deaths [h1]YMMV[/h1] ~Difficulty is all over the place ~Very few iframes ~Movement isn't incredibly precise and no coyote time ~A little more linear than full Metroidvania ~Splash screens are short, but unskippable [h1]The Bad[/h1] -Soft-locked three times in the normal course of play before I gave up -Multiple minor bugs -Not challenging, but frustrating platforming to the point of trolling -Flying enemies are infuriating -Enemy hit and hurtboxes often overlap -Can't mark the map -Coins can easily bounce off-screen -Game forces a small resolution, screwing up your desktop and making it hard to look at Steam overlay Played on: Win11Pro, i7-14700K, RTX4060 Ti 8GB, 32GB DDR5-6000 @ 1920x1080 Using PowerA Enhanced Wired Controller for Xbox Series X|S

I gave up at the end of the game, but I still had lots of fun during my gameplay, so I will recommend it. [h1]The good[/h1] - The game is quite big, with different areas, and it has a charming style. - The game is filled with puzzles, there's a TON of them. Also, they basically do not reuse puzzles, so you are always doing something new. They use the new power-ups you get in lots of creative ways. - The game structure feels more like a Zelda game than traditional Metroidvanias, which is nice as those are not the most common. - There are some power-ups and a bunch of "key" abilities (abilities that are only useful for a small segment of the game). Usually I dislike those, but given the two points above (dungeon structure of the game and lots of unique puzzles), I really like those. [h1]The bad[/h1] - The game is probably bigger than I wanted it to be. There was a point where I thought I was finished with the game, and was moving forward the final dungeon, but no, there's still a lot to do after. - There's a lot of precision platforming and some are more frustrating than fun. For some reason, the devs decided to put lots of flying and/or ranged in those sections to make thing more "fun". - The game is super linear. You always have basically only one way forward, either because your next path is blocked by a new ability or a key. I stopped playing because I got to a precision platformer part that got me too frustrated, but again, overall the game is quite good.

This is an amazing game. Full closure Its a personal favorite of mine. The art, the shapeshifting mechanics, the gameplay, the worlds. All of them are so much fun to play. Nothing feels too hard to too unfair. This is such a fun game to 100% and I loved it all.

So bright, so beautiful, so skillfully animated in its French [i]anime-adjacency[/i]. I'm going to go ahead and call this a Metroidvania with transforming animal powers. Starting out as only the magician pig with the eye-patch (the character in the item shops from past [b]official[/b] Wonder Boy games) feels kind of un-dynamic, since you're just pegging slowly around a swirling, dangerous world on trotters . . . but the subsequent forms really open up the play in a huge way. It blossoms into this amazing multiplex thing where it almost feels like every form gets its own meaty sub-game or two, and all the animal-man personalities sort of meet in the middle between these while you're scrapping around for upgrades. Frog man is my favorite, with his crazy tongue tricks that can spin a room physically around, and his biggest outings are the Mesoamerican ruins and the ocean beneath the pirate ship. But . . . the lion's faster and can crash through things, which is [i]so[/i] satisfying, so maybe that? But the dragon form can fly and shoot fireballs, for crying out loud . . . It's so pretty I can't believe it, it's kind of hard in spots, and there's a lot going on: constant platforming, find-the-treasure in [i]La Mulana[/i] lite (very, very lite) fashion, SHMUP segments, big silly bosses, a very silly story about cursed alcohol and magic orbs. Plays nicely on Steam Deck, too! I remember when this was just going to be [i]Flying Hamster 2[/i] on Greenlight . . . so that's where the concentration on the animal people NPCs came from, and why drunken uncle Nabu just changes everybody into non-humans at the beginning of the game. The designs were already made! This is not a cheap rebranding, however -- there are so many deep references made to Wonder Boy, and all the various gameplay systems, seemingly a separate module for every form and major stage, mesh very well, evidence of the incredible amount of time and effort that must have been spent building this game up over the years.