ELF Reviews

Ocean <3

This is an old school platformer that was made in the early 90s so don't expect anything other than clunky interfaces. That said its one of the first game I played on my old Amiga when it was released as a demo so have good memories of this game. If you can look beyond its flaws and get used to the controls then its a fun game and interesting part of nostalgia to anyone in their 40s or above.

Pressing Right Shift on the menu starts the game. If Cuphead deserves a positive review as a difficult retro 2D game, then an original with memorable music like this probably should too. Surviving for 3 decades in a fast moving industry where far more popular games have been left broken (Battlefield 2 comes to mind), this obscure game (that I often couldn't find even when searching for it) somehow works pretty well on Windows 10. Unlike the early Mario games, it doesn't rely so much on good short-term memory, and had some depth as you go back and forth trying to find objectives for characters (essentially adding some roleplay). But it still suffers the savage difficulty of those early 2D Platformers, which I assume was a lazy attempt to artificially add longevity if they couldn't figure out how to fit content within the limitations of the machines back then (the game is 4MB, which was typical). There is a lot of gameplay in it though, so it seems strange they made it so difficult. A lot of the mad ideas don't work, like being chased by your own ghost which just adds another enemy coming at you out of nowhere. It doesn't compare to a modern 2D game like Terraria that offers greater depth and feels intuitive. There's something to it, it has style, but I wouldn't want to lean towards a positive review on the basis of nostalgia.