Narita Boy is a distillation of everything you think you remember loving about the 1980s. Every single element of Narita Boy, however, is turned up to 11. No one product of the '80s was like this. But our collective neo-nostalgia about that era, and the idea that it was the most futuristic timeframe of any years before or since, seems to be bottled like 1.21 gigawatts within Narita Boy.
There's a techno-sword. There's the Digital Kingdom. There's curved CRT monitor effects. There's a synthwave soundtrack. There's a science-fantasy villain. There's a Ready Player One-styled creator of the Digital Kingdom that you'll contend with. And it's all drawn up with a grimy, digital decay that makes the '80s feel so alive and so ruined at the same time.
The side scrolling sword swinging goes from super saturated to color-drained, and the NPCs range from HAZMAT-suited scientists throwing up the devil's horns to digitized demons spilling their technicolor guts all over the screen. You'll be rolling around in kaiju-sized Tron bots, riding Macintosh unicorns, and skateboarding 3.5" floppy disks in a pixelated nightmare of a boss rush. Hooboy, I'm ready.
Narita Boy is out today, March 30, on PC, Mac, PS4, Xbox One, and Switch (though I'm most excited that it's out day-and-date on Xbox Game Pass). Sorry next-gen owners. All your teraflops can't touch this.
