Monster Boy and the Cursed Kingdom Reviews

Monster Boy and the Cursed Kingdom is a solid Metroidvania game in a bright and colourful package.

Monster Boy and the Cursed Kingdom Review

Monster Boy and the Cursed Kingdom is one of those brilliant retro throwbacks that captures how games used to feel, but without any of the nonsense that arises from how they actually were. It’s consistently entertaining and a blast to play. If you want something to sink your teeth into – human or otherwise – then this is a great choice for sure.

I had the chance to test Monster Boy and the Cursed Kingdom back at E3 2018, and was really impressed by what little I could play. It looked and sounded great, but I really wanted to know if the entire game would wow me as that brief E3 demo. What I can finally say after playing Monster Boy as a whole is that, while I was expecting it to be a very good game, I wasn’t expecting it to be as good as it turned out to be. This is a gem.

It might be missing the name but this is the best Wonder Boy game ever made, updating and expanding the original concepts into a perfect mix of new and old.

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The result is that some people will absolutely love Monster Boy and the Cursed Kingdom, and others will be enraged by it. I sit somewhere in the middle – I really like it, but its flaws have soured my experience with it. For those with a great deal of patience looking for a challenging 2D platformer with huge amounts of character, Monster Boy and the Cursed Kingdom is great. For everyone else, it’s likely to be frustrating just as often as it is fun, severely putting a dampener on the whole affair.

As a huge fan of Wonder Boy, I'm delighted to share my review of the series' spiritual successor: Monster Boy and the Cursed Kingdom.