Monster Boy And the Cursed Kingdom made me question the value of finishing games

Monster Boy and the Cursed Kingdom is a game whose execution can’t quite match the scope of its ambition. It’s an indie title that seeks to take the game style of the Wonder Boy series and update it with modern graphics and gameplay conveniences to create a Metroidvania type adventure with HD visuals that reference those games, and a sound track crafted by some of the best composers from Japan’s 16 bit heyday that has the spirit of chiptunes but the fidelity of more modern music.

This game is absolutely beautiful, even when you're in jail.

To a large degree it’s successful. The game looks absolutely gorgeous, at least when standing still, and the music is incredible. The gameplay, for its part, feels classic, but with some updates and conveniences from more modern game design. It’s a little stiff to control, like those old games were, and it takes a little getting used to, but the game gives you powers at a good clip, evolving the gameplay from area to area so that it doesn’t feel stagnant, and has diverse and creative level design for the majority of its lengthy run time. There are nods to old school challenge but there’s no lives system, save points are generally somewhat reasonable, and the powerups and equipment upgrades are pared back but still extensive enough that they feel rewarding. Several of the items and powers you find are serious game changers, and navigating old areas with new powers is a lot of fun and lets you approach them in a different (easier) fashion than you did the first time. There are lots of opportunities to find secret chests and items and explore the nooks and crannies of the world, complete with extra puzzles. The game is, in fact, so good that despite starting as a project inspired by Wonder Boy it was picked up by Sega and made part of the official Wonder Boy series (impressive though kind of meaningless since it’s not like there’s a cohesive Wonder Boy story.) It’s incredibly aesthetically impressive and a lot of fun. For a good long while.

A frog knight flees from no man nor beast. A boulder though? Yeah, I'll run from a boulder.

The main problem the game has is that its beautiful visual style doesn’t mesh with the level of precision the gameplay requires as it gets towards the end. Lining up your shield to block a projectile can be a pain, as can perfectly lining up jumps or other abilities to try and get on to small platforms. Because the game’s art is more of an anime influenced illustration (there’s even a full on anime opening and ending) and not as visually clear as many of its inspirations, and your characters vary in size and placement of shields etc… the game can be hard to visually read and interact with. It’s also underanimated. The characters look great sitting still, but every action has at most one or two frames of animation associated with it. That makes for quick gameplay, but it also means that the movement, while responsive, can feel stiff, and that it has limited feedback while you play. Enemy hits knock you back and cause some damage but you don’t get a lot of invincibility frames or visual feedback and combat lacks punch or impact. This isn’t just a visual issue because it’s very easy to lose a lot of health quickly and not realize it unless you keep an eye on your life meter, which isn’t always easy in a game that can be very demanding of your attention.

Here the lava drop is very clear but it's easy to lose sight of things like that against the more complex backgrounds, beautiful as they are.

Part of the reason for the lack of animation is because of the game’s premise. You play as a boy whose drunk uncle has gotten a magic wand and turned everyone in the land into monsters of some kind. You get turned into a pig and you need to go out into the world and collect enough magic to let you confront your uncle and turn everyone back to normal. This involves collecting magical orbs, each of which grants you a new monster form, such as a lion who can wield a sword and shield and also charge at things (unlike your pig form, which has magic but is physically limited to a weak punch) or a snake who can crawl into small areas and stick to walls. Because the character has so many forms it makes sense that the small team wasn’t able to build lavish animations for all your characters and the enemies and the environments etc…etc… They had to pick and choose. And for the most part it works fine. You go out into the level, you fight stuff, solve puzzles (unlike most Wonder Boy games Monster Boy is very puzzle oriented), fight a boss, gain a new power of some kind, and move on to the next area. It’s a good loop, but over time the game starts ramping up the difficulty and the lack of feedback and the speed with which everything happens because there’s so little animation makes things start to feel awkward and more difficult than they should. In addition the puzzles don’t give you feedback like you’d hope they would and even though I finished the game only looking up a couple minor things in walkthroughs there were a lot of puzzles that I found frustrating just because it wasn’t clear if what I was doing was having any effect or not, what exactly I could interact with, and what tools were at my disposal to solve them. A fair chunk of the late game was spent wandering around semi-aimlessly trying to figure out what I could do to interact with the world (and where I was supposed to go) before I even got down to figuring out the right way to go about actually doing it.

The final areas and boss fights really compound these issues to the point where I got very near the end, didn’t know what to do exactly, couldn’t tell if the things I was doing were even viable paths forward, and put the game down for over a month before checking a walkthrough to see if I was on the right path (I wasn’t, and the game had been opaque about something important) and then charging forward to the finish, which was only about an hour away. The last boss was not very difficult but like the boss before him he had multiple phases (in this case 5), required experimentation to figure out how to hurt him, and did not have any checkpoints, meaning that you had to replay phases you’d already figured out before you could get back to the later phases where you were experimenting to see how you could take him down. There was also an unskippable mid-boss dialog sequence in there because of course there was. It probably took me 3-4 tries to figure him out and defeat him, but I found it really annoying and it reminded me why I put the game down in the first place and left me with a sour taste in my mouth about a game that I really enjoyed for the first 2/3rds of its (for me) 18 hour run time.

This is just a chunk of the huge Metroidvania style map. It's a big game with a ton to do, and it's a lot of fun for the majority of the run time.

I’ve made an effort to finish the games I start as often as possible over the last decade or so. As a young person I barely finished any games (I’m not sure if I completed a single one on my NES) and I find it somewhat rewarding to have the entire experience that a developer intends by playing from beginning to end. I treat games as art and I don’t like stopping a movie halfway through either. But unlike a movie a game requires active engagement to get through, and you can’t just sit there waiting for it to be over. If you don’t quite pick up what the game is putting down then you might find your progress slowing to a crawl. It can be frustrating, especially if the game isn’t giving you enough direction about whether you’re doing the right thing, or has issues that make it hard to engage with productively.

I didn’t get much enjoyment out of finishing Monster Boy, and I think doing so actually sapped some of my enthusiasm for the easier and, in my view, more fun first part of the game, where the flaws were less apparent because it didn’t matter whether the game was giving you accurate feedback when you weren’t trying to use a frustratingly spaced dash move to get through a bunch of lasers that would drain half your life bar if you touched one. You were just slashing at jaunty little crabs and doing basic water current puzzles.

Early puzzles are extremely visually clear but later ones might span multiple rooms and have interactive objects that are less obvious than a giant block with a bomb symbol.

I don’t like being the kind of person who abandons games. Sometimes, however, beating a game just isn’t worth it. Developers often focus on the first parts of their games more than the end because many people won’t ever make it to the end (about 35% on PlayStation and less on Xbox) but everyone will play the beginning. Also games are sometimes developed somewhat in chronological order, and the ending parts may be rushed and have less time for testing and balancing. Games often put their best foot forward and save the worst for last, as well as catering in the end to the people who like the game’s unique mechanics and style rather than those who just find it kind of fun. Monster Boy’s final hours aren’t incredibly difficult (especially if you look things up, which I mostly didn’t), but they’re also not a lot of fun, and they feel like the work of a developer who felt compelled to provide a big, tough, finale but didn’t have enough good ideas to actually make it work.

You know a platformer is running out of ideas when it throws in a mandatory stealth section.

Do I recommend Monster Boy? Sure. It’s initial asking price (which I paid) was $40, and given the quality of the art and music and the nearly 20 hour length that’s not unreasonable. And that’s just to beat the last boss. I’m at about 65% completion for the game as a whole so this is a long game with a lot to do. As I type this it’s on sale on PlayStation for $16, and at that price it’s more or less a steal, even if you don’t complete it. There’s a lot of content here, a lot of it’s very good, and they really don’t make games like this anymore. But if you’re like me and you start to find the back end frustrating and not as fun, I wouldn’t recommend pushing through. It doesn’t get better. It’s definitely a finishable game; I was able to pick it up after a month off and get through the end without too much trouble, but it’s a slog and the somewhat far checkpoints and annoying bosses don’t relent.

The game has a few tricks, like throwing you into the background here, that it doesn't repeat much, but most of its ideas get rehashed quite a bit by the end.

Sometimes you don’t have to finish a game to enjoy the best of what it has to offer. Modern games are designed to be finished for the most part, but older games and throwbacks have a less friendly disposition. Just like with a meal it’s fine to leave a little bit unfinished on your plate. Better than force feeding yourself until you’re sick of what you’re eating and just want to stop. I force fed myself the end of Monster Boy and I kind of regret it.