It’s been a long time since we’ve seen Dizzy and other
puzzle/platform heroes making their way onto consoles and computers. A brief
return for the genre came with an iOS version of Dizzy: Prince of the Yolk
Folk, but by and large everything has remained quiet. Spud’s Quest clearly
wants to change that and provides gamers with another chance to manage their
inventory, jump around and drop items to solve puzzles.
Anyone familiar with the Dizzy or Seymour games will be
right at home here. In the traditional way your character has to pick up items
and take them to the place they need to be used. You can carry five items at
once but you’ll still end up using a number of the games areas to dump things
in. It’s all very Dizzy like and there are number of familiar areas and moments
that fans of the Dizzy games will recognise and remember.
As well as the traditional item puzzles there are a few new
tricks added to try and carve out an identity for Spud as its own entity. To start with there’s a switching mechanic
which allows players to change to controlling a frog (a prince with a curse of
course). The frog can then be used to access smaller areas and solve puzzles. Our
hero can also attack enemies by throwing stones. This adds a bit more for
players to do as they can kill monsters instead of just avoiding them. Leaving
a screen causes monsters to re-spawn though so it can become repetitive.
There is also a night and day cycle at work which adds some
variety to the colour palette as well as causing various shops and houses to open
and close and characters to move around. The graphical style is clear and
colourful and highly reminiscent of Dizzy’s Amiga and other 16-bit adventures. However,
In a way this is one of the game’s biggest problems.
Much like Retro City Rampage, it’s nice to see all the references
but if you know the source material your thoughts start to drift off to those games.
As well put together as Spud’s Quest is and as much care, attention and genuine
warmth towards the source material has been put into it, it’s just not quite
got that magical something that the best Dizzy games have.
The game also carries the problems associated with the
genre, such as obscure puzzles and constant back tracking. Not a problem as
such, as you know what you are getting into but new players may well lose
interest after tracking back and forth through the same screens. The bigger
inventory negates some of this but you still don’t really know what items you’ll
need until you get to a destination.
Any issues though are fairly minor. This is an enjoyable
adventure of the like we haven’t seen for a while. It’s an admirable attempt to
try and get this style of game back into people’s thoughts and the game clearly
has a lot of love for the games it is reminiscent of. If you’ve been waiting
for something new in the Dizzy style then it’s well worth checking out. It’s a
promising sign for the future and we hope the team build upon this to create a
genuine classic in the future.
Overall 7/10
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