Nogalious

There has been a big push lately towards creating authentic 8-bit games on modern consoles. From Shovel Knight to Rock Boshers to Alwa's Awakening, I'm constantly amazed by the amount of quality side-scrollers coming from indie developers. Nogalious is the newest the newest example of this trend, though it's a bit different. While other throwback titles generally attempt to be accessible to all players, this game makes no such effort. This is a punishing and often frustrating start to what is supposed to be a three-part series.

This is the story of a father who is caught up in a battle against the dark side when his daughter Mariet is kidnapped by the evil Darama. This sets him off on an adventure through five lengthy worlds full of ghouls, ghosts and all kinds of other monsters. You'll also run into a number of tough bosses and a handful of puzzles. The result is a fairly straight-forward action game that looks and plays like a thirty year old Nintendo Entertainment System game.

Each world is split up into a bunch of mostly single-screen areas where the goal is to find a key to move on. This will be complicated by the enemies, spikes, moving platforms and every other 8-bit cliche you can think of. Once you've gathered up the key, you'll move on to the next stage where you'll do the same thing all over again. For what it's worth, not every screen is about collecting keys, but there's usually something you need to do in order to trigger the exit.

Nogalious is the kind of game that expects you to replay the stages over and over until you've memorized the correct path and strategy. The word I would use to describe the game is "cheap," because the first-time developer definitely took pleasure in making it a little too easy to accidentally die. You can't just run into the next area, because chances are you'll smack into an enemy or fall into the water. Of course, it's only tough until you've memorized the inconvenient enemy placement or trick to each puzzle. The game is surprisingly short and simple when you know where everything is, but getting to that point will take hours of trial and error gameplay. That's more frustrating than fun.

One of the things I like about Nogalious is how you'll be able to pick up various weapons and power-ups throughout the five worlds and exploit them to find hidden areas and solve puzzles. What I don't like is how the power-ups will disappear when you die. It's all too common to get to a point where you need to use the power, die and then have to backtrack all the way back to where you got the power to begin with. This is only made worse by the checkpointing, which always starts you in the room where you died. Either we need to keep the required power-up or we should start back where we got it, because the way it is now just leads to a lot of needless backtracking.

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The other big problem is that Nogalious remains a bit buggy. It's not just the occasionally inconsistent frame rate, but how the stages don't always act how they're supposed to. A good example of this is a bit where you're supposed to jump from vine to vine while the birds cut them in half. The vines are supposed to grow back, allowing you to get to the other side, but there are times when the birds are so aggressive that vines never return. You're just stuck there. And that reminds me, you can get stuck inside the walls and platforms, making it impossible to move. This happened about a half dozen times, and the result is always to restart the game from the beginning.

All this is a real shame, since I like almost everything else about this package. I'm a fan of the authentic graphics, the enemy designs, the hidden areas and the Castlevania cliches. I also dig the bosses, though they can be a bit cheap at times. The graphics and music are all spot-on, it's just the gameplay, difficulty and polish that miss the mark.

Nogalious is a throwback game for those looking for a true old school challenge. This is a tough game that demands you play it over and over until you've memorized the right paths and solutions. It's cheap and not always fair, two things that are made worse by the inconsistent performance and rampant bugs. This is an ominous start to what sounds like an ambitious trilogy.