Kudzu came to this reviewer during a significant birthday celebration. The day was filled with echoes of our past. There was music on the radio – quirky remixes of early-to-mid-’90s techno songs that pre-teens encouraged visits to cotton candy-filled fun fairs. And then there was Kudzu and its unsubtle resemblance to the all-time classic Zelda: Link’s Awakening in the original 1993 Game Boy iteration. It’s crazy to think that we’ve now played Link’s Awakening to death 30 years ago.
Time really does fly as fast as an arrow from Link’s bow. We started Kudzu Pie for Breakfast Studios wondering if it was a new “non-linear adventure game” for Game Boy — because it’s also available on Switch as a digital download and as a physical Game Boy cart from Mega Cat Studios — will hold the attention of our aging minds.
Truly retro experiences have their appeal, but we’re spoiled for choice with neo-retro games that rehash the past to become more rather than their inspiration – such as The Eternal Castle and Celeste, which repackaged groups of pixel-based games with modern gimmicks and a heightened level of storytelling ambition. In contrast, and probably because it was made to work real Game Boy hardware, Kudzu takes on Link’s Awakening in a way that’s about as honest, respectful, and direct as possible. Almost nothing has been improved.
But that means no modern distraction either. Kudzu lives and dies on the same critical scale as the Nintendo-made mini behemoth. It is a difficult task.
Very quickly, however, Kudzu starts to feel like the adorable, smaller, inspiration-worn-proudly-yet-full-of-its-own-personality little cousin of Link’s Awakening. It’s a personality mostly defined by Pie for Breakfast’s truly original story, strong writing, and great music. Smaller games tried similar things but failed due to poor design, but here, as we will try to explain, the quality of many production hits dark. Lead developer Christopher Totten has orchestrated Kudzu so well that the game flows in a sophisticated manner. Very little seems distracting or inactive. The game works. Mainly.
You play as Max, a bearded apprentice gardener with a wide-brimmed hat. This more contemporary story begins with an already awake Max (definitely a Zelda-themed joke) who quickly discovers that his mentor has disappeared – apparently after going to battle Kudzu, (surprisingly real) invasive plant species that threaten uncontrolled growth. For over four hours, we traveled through fields, gardens, mansions, swamps and more, on a compelling journey infused with our own brand of Zelda-esque weirdness.
The game seems a bit creepy. The setting of the titular plant and the scientists drawn to its research have a pleasantly offbeat feel. Seeing cars and roads in a game so similar to Game Boy Zelda is a novelty. The music develops perfectly. The songs are varied and infectious, and convey the reality of being isolated in somewhat dangerous fields, caught up in strange events. The graphics, whether in the scene-setting (and show-stealing) title cards for each area of the game or choosing small moments of world expansion, like when Max walks into his mentor’s house and notices the view in the back that overlooks endless kudzu fields, look great – complete, polished.
Our initial question, What is the appeal of playing such a purely retro game? — that subtle, general concern that the game wouldn’t be able to keep our modern attention spans cluttered with entertainment — ceased to matter as we explored. Those fine-tuned design choices drove us—the satisfaction of health drops, the need to get to the next part of the game, unlock the next door, beat the next boss. To play a little more.
It’s a shame then that there are some real downsides – probably not enough to put you off because Kudzu is a good game – but at release, Kudzu felt a little buggy and suffered from emulation-style slowdown. Nothing broke the game (and after playing other NES and Game Boy games on the Switch, the slowdown felt kind of appropriate), but on just a few occasions the bosses almost disappeared. If their spirits were composed of four parts, three were gone. However, even more affecting is the lack of any consistent sound effects when attacking enemies and when enemies hit back. In a game so polished in other ways, this was a bit of a surprise, so much so that we repeatedly turned the switch on and off to see if anything went wrong. Occasionally it led us to an unjust death, and once or twice it even drove us into a rage to give up in our quiet, senile ways.
This lack of feedback threw us out of the game a few times. You pick up new gardening tools throughout the game, and during a certain boss fight we enjoyed experimenting with our new rake. We were still figuring out what to do – how to cause damage – when the fight suddenly ended. We did something right, but with no audio or visual feedback that our actions were working, we were left a little deflated when the game moved on.
We can’t be sure if these issues are also part of the Game Boy version, but generally speaking, we feel very positive about Kudzu. It is mainly a polished, four-hour, new Zelda-style retro game built to run directly on 8-bit hardware (if you’re playing on Switch you can choose from four different border options as you go – but really, who would choose anything but black?).
If Kudzu isn’t for you, then you probably already knew that before reading this review. We enjoyed the game, it came to us as in a time of great changes. Kudzu found its unique place in our diverse Switch library: because it reminded us of a time so many years ago when the Game Boy’s low-contrast green screen meant all.
Conclusion
Kudzu is a good adventure and we are sure we would like it sometime. We can even imagine elementary school kids arguing that, somehow, Kudzu is better than Link’s Awakening. This is partly because young children are often deliberately contradictory, but also because Kudzu’s character and game world are truly remarkable. This comes to the fore in tight writing and a pleasant gaming experience. Its slight lack of polish might bring it down, but the Switch’s price is reasonable. We’re sure fans of retro gaming will find a lot to love, and playing Kudzu on an actual Game Boy would be a real treat.
