A De-Rezzed Fez That Delights More Than It Frustrates
Take the main character from Fez, but de-fez him. Now add a green felt cap and thrust him into Link’s Awakening. We’re talking the original Link’s Awakening on Game Boy, not the plastiscene remake on Switch. And ta da! You have CASSETTE BOY.
As much as we could end the review there – and it really does cover 90% of CASSETTE BOY – we should at least pretend to do our jobs.
Take A Walk(man)
I have a soft spot for games that de-make themselves to become Game Boy games. It’s all selfish nostalgia: it sends me back to the ‘90s, hunkering over the grey box, trying to pick out sprites from the sludge of green. And CASSETTE BOY is so good at copying it. It’s got the clarity and snap of a top-drawer indie game, but the aesthetic of a Game Boy game.
Things kick off in a resolutely Zelda fashion. The opening village is the kind of bucolic starter-town that would rank highly on a ‘gaming town you’d like to live in’ list. It’s got a shop, a merchant who swaps collectibles for rewards, and a farm. You are the plucky boy who wants to be an adventurer.
And you get to be an adventurer. The moon has been plucked from the sky and its four moonstones have been scattered. Your job is to recover them through the exploration of four dungeons and defeating their four bosses. CASSETTE BOY very much plays by the Hyrules.
Twist And Shout
BUT BUT BUT. CASSETTE BOY has a handy gimmick to make it something very different indeed. While exploring the first dungeon, the boy finds a nick-nack that allows them to switch the game screen through ninety-degrees with a touch of the LB and RB buttons. There’s an absolutely glorious moment when the player returns to the starting village and can view the backs and sides of buildings. It’s like putting on 3D glasses for the first time. Suddenly, doors and passages are visible.
Which, of course, is how Fez played out. It’s a rather wonderful marriage. Zelda’s framework offers a world that draws you in. You want to find every area, and discover every secret within them. Fez bolts on beautifully. Now you’re interrogating each area like a giant holding a snowglobe. What secrets can you find?
The comparisons to Fez and Zelda sound derivative when CASSETTE BOY very much isn’t. It’s clever enough to bring something of its own. Because, when you pivot the scene through ninety-degrees, it breaks line-of-sight on certain elements. An enemy might be hidden behind a pillar from a certain perspective. Now, inspired by “if a tree falls and no-one is there to see it, does it truly fall?”, CASSETTE BOY takes a philosophical stand. If you can’t see something then, no, it doesn’t exist. That enemy behind a pillar is now a non-entity.
Pivot again and the enemy reappears, but – in that one moment, from that one perspective – it is gone. You can walk safely through the space that it was standing on.
Nintendo Eat Your Heart Out
You can imagine what Miyamoto would do with that idea. And Wonderland Kazikiri does a great job of taking the ball and running with it. Spikes that would kill you are now safe. Gates can be passed through. An arrow, when fired into an un-visible space, will only continue its trajectory after the pivot.
It’s a logical sandbox where the different actions and reactions are mind-boggling. CASSETTE BOY knows that it could be too much for the player, so has a plan. The main storyline has relatively simple puzzles, but there are Breath of the Wild-like shrines hidden about the world, labelled with a QR code. These are (almost) entirely optional, and thank god that they are. They kicked our voxel arse multiple times.
CASSETTE BOY’s strengths are undoubtedly the puzzles. It chucks in Zelda-like tools like bows, bombs and secret-revealers to stretch the logic even further. This is the CASSETTE BOY I wanted to play.
The puzzling isn’t perfect, as I think it takes some liberties with the rules it creates. Switches, enemies and blocks are all deemed invisible if they are out of line-of-sight, which makes sense. BUT water, pits and walls are NOT deemed invisible in the same way. I understand why, for the sake of hemming the player in, but it does frustrate. You can come up with a cunning solution only to be told that, nah, it doesn’t work like that.
Combat? We Wish You Hadn’t
CASSETTE BOY is at its worst when it ticks all of the remaining Zelda boxes. It didn’t need to have combat, but combat seems to be here for the Zelda comparisons. And it’s shoddy: a splashy hack-and-slash system with combos that send you diving into enemies. We would often stop short of completing a combo, simply so we had more control. The bow and arrow is the worst, as you inconsistently nock an arrow with a button press. A lack of enemy lock-on makes firing difficult.
This is most problematic with the bosses. Some are apologetically easy, as if in acknowledgment of the shonky combat, while others are long and awkward confrontations. One robot boss in particular can do one.
The bosses are also victim of another CASSETTE BOY flaw: it doesn’t like to hold your hand. In 90% of CASSETTE BOY, that is utterly refreshing. There’s a confidence in its level design, pushing you to find a solution rather than drop hints or put a star on a map. But there are moments where more prodding absolutely was necessary. This includes some bosses, but it absolutely includes the post-boss. Knowing where to head next after completing a dungeon is annoyingly opaque. Oh, you wanted me to bring seeds to an innocuous mousehole? Yeah, sure mate. And don’t get us started on a latter section where the game decides that, yes, you do actually need to complete the optional dungeons to progress. CASSETTE BOY lied.
An Inventive Path Between Icons
CASSETTE BOY has warts, but press LB and RB enough and they might just look like chiselled cheekbones. We forgave its issues because it’s just so gung-ho in its inventiveness. It has a killer idea – to let the player pivot the screen, and render invisible anything that’s hidden – and then goes all-in.
While CASSETTE BOY doesn’t quite reach the heights of its best chums, Fez and Legend of Zelda, it does a sterling job of finding its own path between them. It’s inordinately clever, just a little unwieldy and unhelpful at times. I’d say that makes it an adventure worth embarking on.
Important Links
What You Cannot See No Longer Exists – CASSETTE BOY Is On PC And Console – https://www.thexboxhub.com/what-you-cannot-see-no-longer-exists-cassette-boy-is-on-pc-and-console/
Buy from the Xbox Store – https://www.xbox.com/en-gb/games/store/cassette-boy/9ncnrhkg2h44
