Monday 25 July 2022

Parasite Pack Review (Switch)

After having found success through the Indie cartridge on the Evercade the NES developed Flea! And Tapeworm Disco Puzzle have now been bundled together for a very reasonable price on the Switch. It’s an interesting move to see games developed for retro systems starting to find more mainstream releases and these two titles could well see some other high profile indie darlings making the leap across.

Flea! Is basically the (even more), indie version of Super Meat Boy. The Switch screen gives the game a new lease of life and despite the strange colour palette at times it is consistently strong and fun throughout. You do have access to save states, as this is technically running on a NES emulator, which is handy as this thing is tough. Lives are not hard to come by though so as long as you have some decent reflexes you should be able to make it through the 80 or so levels. It’s testament to the strength of the game that it is still worth playing on the Switch among so many competitors.

Tapeworm Disco Puzzle is also great fun. It takes the concept of Snake and turns it into a puzzle game with a serious amount of variety. It starts out in simple fashion by giving you a certain amount of moves with which to collect objects within a single screen puzzle. Later though you’ll be creating platforms to shepherd lemming like fleas to level exits or moving the Disco Worm around without the ability to stop.

It certainly packs a host of clever ideas into its hundred levels and is both addictive and great fun to play. The characters you meet along the way and even the worm itself are charming creations as well and there’s some nice transition scenes to look at.

Overall, the Parasite Pack is likely to be overlooked by many a Switch owner but it really shouldn’t. Both these games are filled with a lot of good ideas and they stand as great examples of how this new wave of retro games developed for retro consoles should be. If nothing else, it highlights a creative talent at the heart of these games who is clearly someone to keep an eye on in the future.

Overall 7/10

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