Kudzu came to this reviewer for a milestone birthday celebration. The day was filled with echoes of our past. There’s music on the radio – weird remixes of early to mid-90s techno songs that used to advertise cotton candy fun fair visits for teenagers . And there’s Kudzu and its undeniable similarities to the all-time classic Zelda: Link’s Awakening in the original 1993 Game Boy version. It’s crazy to think that we played Link’s Awakening to death 30 years ago.
Time passed as quickly as an arrow shot from Link’s bow. We started Pie for Breakfast Studios’ Kudzu and wondered if it might be a new “non-linear adventure game” for the Game Boy — because it’s available on Switch as a technical download number And EQUAL a physical Game Boy cart from Mega Cat Studios – will capture the attention of our aging minds.
Classic experiences do have their appeal, but we’ve been spoiled by neo-retro games that rehash the past to become than rather than their inspiration—as Eternal castle And Celeste, repackaging pixel-based games with modern tricks and a higher level of storytelling ambition. On the contrary, and possibly because it was built to work on actually Game Boy hardware, Kudzu’s take on Link’s Awakening is as sincere, respectful, and direct as possible. Almost nothing is enhanced.
But this means there are no modern distractions at all. Kudzu lives and dies on a critical scale like a mini giant produced by Nintendo. It’s a difficult task.
Very quickly, however, Kudzu begins to feel like a delightful, diminutive, inspired and proud yet full of personality cousin to Link’s Awakening. It’s a character largely defined by Pie for Breakfast’s truly original plot, strong writing, and wonderful music. Smaller games have tried similar things but failed due to poor design, but here, as we will try to explain, the quality of many successful production games That’s right. Lead developer Christopher Totten has organized Kudzu so well that the game flows delicately. Very little feels distracted or turned off. The game works. Most of.
You play as Max, a bearded apprentice gardener wearing a wide-brimmed hat. This more modern-set story begins with a sobered Max (no doubt a Zelda-themed joke) quickly discovering that his mentor has disappeared – apparently having gone off to war. vs. Kudzu, one (surprisingly real) invasive plant species are at risk of growing out of control. For over four hours, we adventured through fields, gardens, mansions, swamps, etc., on a fascinating journey that tied in with its own brand of Zelda-style quirks.
The game feels a bit creepy. The setting up of the iconic factory and the scientists drawn to study it have an interesting sense of strangeness. Seeing cars and roads in a game that feels a lot like Game Boy Zelda is a novelty. The music develops perfectly. The tunes are varied and catchy, and express the reality of being isolated in somewhat dangerous areas, caught up in strange goings-on. Graphics, whether in title cards that set the scene (and steal the show) for each area of the game or pick out small world-expanding moments, such as when Max enters his grandfather’s house I asked my questions and noticed that the back view, overlooking the endless kudzu fields, looked amazing – finished, polished.
Our original question, What is the appeal of playing such a pure classic game? – the subtle, generic worry that games won’t be able to capture our entertainment-overloaded modern attention spans – fell out of favor as we explored. Those fine-tuned design choices drove us – the satisfaction of dropping health, the need to get to the next part of the game, unlock the next gate, defeat the next boss. To play a little more.
Unfortunately, there are also some genuine negatives – probably not enough to disappoint you as Kudzu is a good game – but upon release, Kudzu felt a bit buggy and slowed down in a simulated fashion. There’s nothing game-breaking (and after playing other NES and Game Boy games on the Switch, the slowdown feels appropriate) but in just a few instances the bosses almost disappear. If their souls were made up of four pieces, then three of them would have disappeared. More affecting, however, is the lack of any consistent sound effects when we attack enemies and when enemies fight us back. In a game that’s polished in other ways, this was a bit of a surprise, to the point where we turned the Switch on and off multiple times to see if anything went wrong. Sometimes this caused us to die unjustly, and once or twice even caused us to throw a tantrum and quit in the manner of a quiet old man.
This lack of feedback caused us to leave the game a few times. Throughout the game you get new gardening tools and during a certain boss fight we had fun testing out our new rake. We were still figuring out what to do – how to do damage – when the fight suddenly ended. We did something right, but with no audio or visual feedback to show our actions were working, we were a bit lost as the game continued.
We can’t be sure whether these issues are part of the Game Boy version, but overall we feel very positive about Kudzu. It is a most of The new classic, four-hour, Zelda-style game is built to run directly on 8-bit hardware (if you play on Switch, you can choose between four different border options as you moving on – but really, who would choose anything but black?).
If Kudzu isn’t for you then you probably already knew that before reading this review. We enjoyed our time with the game, coming to us as it did during a time of great change. Kudzu has found its own unique place on our diverse Switch library: because it reminds us of a time years ago when the Game Boy’s green, low-contrast screen does that mean everything.
Conclusion
Kudzu is a fun adventure and we are sure we would have loved it back in the day. We can even imagine kids in elementary school claiming that, in some ways, Kudzu is better than Link’s Awakening. This is partly because young children are often deliberately contradictory, but also because Kudzu’s characters and game world are truly remarkable. This is reflected in some solid writing and an enjoyable gameplay experience. Its lack of polish may give it away, but the Switch’s price is reasonable. We’re confident that fans of classic games will find much to love, and playing Kudzu on the Game Boy will be a real joy.
