Twenty years ago there was a tough yet endearing game for the NES. This is a modern tribute to that game, with hand-drawn cartoon graphics and many unfairnesses fixed. In case you didn't know, it's essentially a 2D platform jumper, except that the "eponymous" boy can't do much until he feeds different flavored jelly beans to his pet blob in order to make the blob transform into different useful tools. The game is mostly figuring out how to use those tools to traverse obstacles.

The first game in the series gave you a limited supply of jelly beans and put you in one big interconnected world. You had to do a lot of experimentation to figure out which jelly beans did what and where to use them, which meant a lot of unavoidable death in order to learn the game. This time around, the game is broken into levels. In each level you are limited to a certain selection of jelly beans, although the supply is unlimited. So you no longer have reason to fear experimenting with rare jelly beans. The limited set of jelly beans for each level also provides direction, since the original set of all jelly beans all the time was sometimes overwhelming. Overall, these changes make the game much more accessible and fun than the original.

I have two complaints about this game. They might be forgiveable faults, in that I know there will be some people out there who are unable to see what I'm talking about. Nonetheless, little things can sometimes have a big impact.

One is that some of the animation is cartoons hand-drawn by humans, and some of it is clearly not, but instead too-perfect robotic computer animation. These two styles of animation clash when placed right next to one another, and this greatly diminishes the effect of having the hand-drawn cartoons in the first place. The most obvious case of this is that the teleporter doors have stereotypical computer-generated particles coming out of them, which don't look like they're straight out of a cartoon at all. But there are many less obvious examples of this clash, including even the way the boy walks around. The clash reminds me of many early CD-ROM titles that took the term "multimedia" too literally and haphazardly combined disparate styles of graphics. One example that comes to mind is Phantasmagoria, which was pretty good for its time, but nevertheless had real-life people walking around in a clearly computer-rendered house, and the overlap just looked wrong. In retrospect, it would be difficult to eliminate entirely all traces of robotic animation in favor of the hand-drawn look, but I still think they should have tried.

My other complaint is that a reward for beating the "hard" levels is getting to view the artists' concept sketches and incomplete graphics. This is not a reward. This is yet another case of artists overestimating how much we're paying attention to their petty trials & tribulations. As if the final product can't speak for itself. Why do you have to break the fourth wall for some classless "braggadocio" every time I beat a level? Can't it wait until I select "unlocked bonus materials" (or not, ever) from the main menu? There is a time and a place for catering to überfans, and it's not before you know they're out there.

Combined together, these faults show that this game was designed by "multimedia students".

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Update from the distant future: In a world overrun with Kickstarter Rewards, this sort of excessive self-celebration within mediocre games has become all to common. I might be the only one who doesn't like it, so please don't let me stop you from enjoying a game.