I was hit by a wave of nostalgia when I spotted Squidlit in the Nintendo eShop. The game is a throwback to the classic GameBoy games of my childhood and Squidlit is an homage to those simple games. The game looks, sounds, and feels like I’m playing my GameBoy and it feels so good.
Rather than this be a straight port of a GB title from yesteryear, Squidlit is a brand new original game. Sure it was released in early 2018 on Steam, but a Nintendo portable is where this game belongs and it feels right at home in my hands.
Are you ready for an invertebratey adventure? Do you have the gumption to take on a mighty quest for the good of oodles of squidlits everywhere? If so, many trials await you as you squrp your way to victory in the squishiest of escapades!
The game is very simple to control and play and you’ll really only need two buttons – the d-pad and one button. This is based off the original GameBoy after all. In the game you’ll move around, jump, and squirt ink down on your enemies to defeat them. The game has simple and straight forward game play, like all good platformers of the era do.
The developer went though some trouble to make sure that the game has no more specs than the original GameBoy could handle, and they tout them in their game description. The game has o more than ten 8-pixel wide sprites in a line and no more than 40 sprites at any time. It features four sound channels that are shared between “voices” of music and the sound effects and the resolution is 160 x 144 pixels. Oh and the game has a whopping 4 shades of… “grellow.”
Squidlit has upbeat and catchy chiptunes in the different levels. They’re really well done and fun to play to.
True to some of the limitations of the day, or perhaps just the design choices of some of the older games, there is no save feature in Squidlit. You’ll have to get to the end of the game in one sitting. That’s not too difficult though as the game is very short. Once you play get a feel for the game it’s not too tough to get through the game in less than an hour from start to finish. I wish the game had been a bit longer because it does feel really short, but it was an enjoyable game to play. The game is also very forgiving and there is no life counter. The healing items are pretty generous and when you die you’ll just restart the level or boss battle. There’s no game over (that I encountered anyway).
At $1.99 USD it would be crazy to not pick up even if you only have passing nostalgia. It’s definitely like a trip down memory lane and has me looking to my shelf at my GameBoy. Hopefully this is the start of more GameBoy inspired indie games on the Nintendo Switch.
