Monster Boy and the Cursed Kingdom

Monster Boy and the Cursed Kingdom is a beautiful, challenging, and fantastic successor to the Wonder Boy series.

One of gaming's great neglected oldies gets a spiritual successor crafted with care and imagination.

The action is faster, the controls more responsive, the visuals are sharper and the music is more full and lush. It improves on the original in every way. It’s even a little more sadistic.

Monster Boy is a tremendous accomplishment. It's a gorgeous looking game with a fantastic soundtrack and does its spiritual predecessors proud by nailing the Wonder Boy mechanics while still offering something that will appeal to modern audiences. As long as you can appreciate that it's still very much an old-school game at heart and you're going to get some 8-bit era platforming trickiness as a result, you're going to thoroughly enjoy playing through this adventure for the 12-15 hours it'll take you to beat it. It may not be Wonder Boy by name, but it's definitely wonderful by nature.

Monster Boy and the Cursed Kingdom is a great metroidvania. It's got just about everything: tight duration, many characters (although it's really only one with several shapes) with a variety of moves, varied settings and tight gameplay. If you liked Wonder Boy, buy it. And if not, man!

Despite Monster Boy and the Cursed Kingdom being a revival of a 30-year old franchise, it doesn't show at all. It takes only the good parts of the original Wonder Boy games and feels modern in every way.

Monster Boy and the Cursed Kingdom is not a flawless game and certain parts of it could have been much better, but no one can deny its high production values and how masterfully it is made. Wonder Boy / Monster World fans will find themselves right at home and experience a vastly improved but extremely faithful successor to those titles, and newcomers to the franchise can enjoy playing one of the best and most fun metroidvania titles released in the recent years

Monster Boy and the Cursed Kingdom is a wonderful modern reimagination of the Wonder Boy franchise. The story and graphics are filled with nods to the franchise’s long history.

I did mostly enjoy the game as a whole and don’t regret my time with it, but it feels uneven and frustrating to me a lot of the time.

This is a game that’s half a brilliant homage to the old-school Wonder Boy games—particularly Wonder Boy in Monster Land and Wonder Boy in Monster World—and half a game seeking to artificially inflate its length with gimmicks and mandatory busywork. I wholeheartedly recommend one of those halves while having nothing but disdain for the other.