Revenge of the Bird King (Switch)

Like many others, I was intrigued when this retro-styled indie game popped up on the Nintendo Switch eShop, on sale for a measly 9 cents.  I mean, I had more than 9 gold points, so whatever, I grabbed it.  There's a limit to how bad a retro-styled platforming adventure game can be, right?

Well, sorta.

It takes influences from a lot of classic NES titles, namely Mega Man and The Legend of Zelda 2: Link's Adventure.  In addition, there's a central hub area on the world map that serves as a save point and a shop, and you warp back there after completing a level.  So far, so good.

The overworld is where the Zelda 2 influence shows itself.  From the graphics tiles representing areas you can enter, to the black silhouetted enemies that pop up and pull you into a short level if you touch them.  If you've played Zelda 2, it's very similar.  Except that you can pause and select "exit to map" if you didn't want to actually get pulled into that short level by the black silhouetted enemies, which I'll leave as a plus.

The main stages are very much Mega Man-inspired, mostly consisting of a series of screens you navigate without a huge amount of screen scroll involved until you reach the edge of the screen.  There are a few exceptions, though.  There's a stage that takes place on a train that's just one long stage rather than being divided up into screens, as one might expect a train stage to be.  Also, there's a stage where you're flying a vehicle that's an autoscroller.  There are other examples on a smaller scale, but those are the notable ones.

The music is great.  It's very NES-inspired, to go along with the graphics.  It probably uses more sound channels than the NES had available, though.  In the case that's true, they're not real chiptunes.  Still enjoyable though.  I'll take an NES orchestra.

Controls are fairly normal, but have their quirks that are tied to the overall design and premise of the game.  You play as a bird that uses guns.  He has a sword, but you can't really use it in combat too much, it's more for clearing obstructions and knocking armor off of certain enemies.  The main quirk is the guns: they're plants.  You can plant seeds that grow into guns, and as you play through the game, more guns get unlocked.  You have to buy the vast majority of them, but the basic pistol is unlimited.  Just pressing the button grows a gun that you can then pick up and use until it runs out of ammo, but if you hold the button, a turret grows instead.

If you were to go off of everything I've just said, you'd probably be 100% ready to plunk down your money for a neat indie retro-inspired platforming adventure game.  However, there are a number of things that may make you reconsider, that I will now delve into.

First and foremost: The game gives you zero indication of where you've been and where you still need to go.  The overworld wasn't a problem in Zelda 2 because there were towns with NPCs to give hints, but here the overworld just functions as a drawn-out level select, making it a problem.  Levels have multiple objectives and it's not possible to tell which ones you've done and which ones you haven't.  Everything respawns within the level, so you can't even run past one of them to check.  You just pick up an item or defeat a boss and go "wait, I already did that".  To quote AVGN in the Indiana Jones Trilogy episode (9:25 timestamp):

Some call it a platformer game, some call it an adventure game. I classify it as a "Where the fuck do I go?" kind of game. Yeah, one of those.

Second, it's possible to softlock in some stages.  One of them is probably the very first stage you'll ever enter, it's right next to the hub.  You need a weapon from later on in the game to get to the softlock, though.  Partway through the level there's a giant key in the wall.  With the gun that lets you float (yeah, even though the protagonist is a bird, he can't fly), you can reach a platform where you can use your sword to slash open a hidden passage in the wall.  Continuing on with this carves out more of the wall and gets you tantalizingly close to the key, but I have yet to figure out how to actually get to the key.  Once you enter the passage, that's it, you can't get back out and have to pause and select "exit to map".  That's not too bad, at least you can get out of it.  The key itself appears to go to a door in another level, but that's locked behind a door that I have yet to figure out how to get through.  To open it you have to stand on a specific block, but as soon as you move it closes again.  Not sure what I'm missing, and no clue where to find it.

There's a bona fide softlock in one of the other stages, though.  One where the "exit to map" option doesn't do anything.  It's sorta related to a bug that pops up in a few stages.  Each stage has its little opening thing where the first screen is revealed with a transition effect.  On some stages, this plays out twice, complete with the music overlaying itself.  On one stage, though, there's a ton of slowdown that comes with this, and while you can ease it notably by killing the first enemy you come across, it doesn't fully go away.  The kicker is that if you fall in one of the pits, which would normally kill you, you don't die.  You can just walk around underneath the stage, unable to get back out.  It's at this point where you try to exit to the map, to find that it doesn't do anything.  You have to quit the game and restart it.  Hope you saved before going into that stage.

Third: hitboxes seem dodgy at times.  I find myself getting hit when I don't think I should be getting hit according to what's on the screen.  This is especially problematic in the autoscrolling vehicle flying stage because it's littered with one-hit deaths.  Also, anything that's supposed to kill you in one hit only subtracts three hearts from your life meter instead of emptying it.  As a programmer myself, this makes no sense.  Why in the name of fuck do you say "okay, the player's supposed to die if they fall in a pit, so rather than setting their health to zero, let's just subtract three." when you have a game where you can increase your max health beyond its starting value of three?

Fourth: while the stages themselves are quite challenging, the bosses are not.  Remember what I said a mile up the page about planting guns, and how if you hold the button, you get a turret instead?  Well, as it turns out, if you just mash the "plant seed" button, by sheer volume of button presses you'll have it held down when seeds hit the ground, and they'll grow into turrets.  Turrets everywhere.  Turret spam is all you need to take down the bosses.  Just run around spamming turrets and do a half-assed job at dodging to make sure the boss' health goes down faster than yours.  Done.

Yeah, you need the spread shot turrets for at least one of the bosses, and yeah, those seeds cost money, but money is really easy to come by and they're the least expensive seed in the game.  You can have hundreds of these seeds no problem.  Even better: one of the hidden items makes each seed sprout into two guns (or two turrets) instead of just one.  While not that useful in the majority of cases because you'll never get to use the second gun (and no, their ammo counts don't stack if you pick up multiple), having two turrets from one seed makes it possible to defeat the bosses easily while conserving your seeds.

Fifth is a mostly overlookable source of confusion: you can level up, but there's no indication of how close you are to levelling up.  It just sorta happens.  Each level-up increases the damage you deal, and some increase your max health.  I think the max level is 10 since that's where I am and I haven't levelled up in forever, but given that you can't see progress towards your next level, who knows?  It's mostly overlookable because it doesn't really matter that much.  The damage increases are too small to be significant in the majority of cases anyway.  One level-up results in you being able to defeat most enemies in one fewer shot, which is nice, but against bosses the extra damage isn't terribly noticeable because when you're spamming turrets everywhere, you don't really care about the damage dealt by a single shot.

It's like they decided later on in development to add certain things, but didn't re-evaluate the parts of the game they'd already completed to see how those things were affected by the new stuff.

Sixth, there's some TNT in some places, with lines drawn to nearby blocks colored differently from the surrounding terrain, suggesting that at some point I'll gain the ability to detonate the TNT and progress beyond those blocks.  I'd really like to know where and when I get this ability, there's a fair amount of stuff gated behind it, and I've tried everything I currently have to no avail.

What we end up with is a game that manages to be easy, challenging, frustrating, and buggy, all at the same time.  If you have this game and paid any more than 9 cents (or your regional equivalent) for it, you probably want your money back and are cursing the world of digital distribution where you don't really own anything and all purchases are final.  I'm just going to resort to a guide to figure out how to get that key and get the door to stay open, get the feathers from the challenge stages, and blow up the TNT, because I've been everywhere and can't figure it out.