| | Rather loosely based on Winsor McCay's turn-of-the-century Sunday comic strip, Capcom's Nemo hops through a variety of dreamy, candy-landy stages trying to collect the keys to open the locks guarding the door at the end of the area.
I'm not sure what happens when he finally runs out of doors, because the game gets really freakin' hard around the second or third stage.
Aside from the lush giant mushroom backgrounds, the appealing gimmick here are the animal transformations: after feeding three candies to certain animals (non-candy-eating animals merely get stunned by sucrose overload), Nemo pops into their skin, or onto their back, and gains their abilities: an ape can climb and punch, a bee can fly, and so forth. Some puzzle solving is required as the game doesn't tell you exactly where you might need to use the animal; neither does it tell you where the keys are hidden, of course. So it will take at least a few tries probably to figure out where to go and what to do in the course of a stage, particularly as the stages aren't strictly linear, but often offer multiple paths up and down.
Having animal powers sounds great and all, but the control is a bit stiff, and the slightest mis-timing will send you hurtling into something painful or falling down a deadly pit. Sort of funny to see this level of difficulty paired with such a whimsical theme--couldn't get away with that in today's target-audience-obsessed marketing world, I suppose.
The art is great, particularly the Nemo-as-animal sprites. This is a game I'd like to like, but I have to admit to myself that I probably wouldn't play it much, being scared off by the difficulty. |
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