As of writing this review, I am currently playing through from the beginning after having beaten it once and enjoyed it for the most part. The reason I am thumbing it down is not because I think it is a bad game but because it is not perfect by any stretch and I want the average to reflect that. This game does some very annoying things which bring it down in my book, but it's still fun. So let's begin.

Monster Boy And The Cursed Kingdom plays very much like an old-school platformer with RPG elements. It is the successor to Wonder Boy 3: The Dragon's Trap, which itself was a Metroidvania years before Metroidvanias were even a thing. Gameplay wise, it feels very similar to Zelda but in a 2D setting. You start with three hearts and can find more scattered about to achieve a maximum of twenty. You have your basic sword with weak attack and limited range, though you lose the ability to use it early on once you're cursed with your first animal form. There are also a total of five spells to learn, two of which aren't really magic, but utilities like a boomerang and bomb. Yet more shades of Zelda.

Exploration is nearly always fun, and there are loads of secrets to uncover if you're dedicated enough to find them. Even on your first time through you can find many without scouring too hard. Once I regained the ability to use a sword, shield, armor and footwear in the frog form I had already, from exploring and backtracking, found enough loot that I could upgrade my newly purchased fire-sword to do more damage and shoot fireballs at full-health, and raise the defense of the crimson tunic (reminiscent of the red mail from Link to the Past) to maximum defense. Very gratifying indeed.

Each new animal form (pig, snake, frog, lion, and dragon, obtained in that order) have their own set of abilities you'll need to use, often in tandem, to progress further into the game. In addition, certain spells and accessories have their own abilities that must be used for accessing new areas. It all works together to make the game unfold in a way that rarely feels unintuitive or artificial. One part I struggled with early one were the magic truffles which you need to consume to gain new magic. I think the Steam version of this game differs from console versions because I've seen Youtube videos where you need only brush away the leaves to uncover the truffles whereas on PC you have to ground-pound the area just to reveal them. This stumped me at first and I only found the one I needed to progress after trial and error as I was committed (at first) to figuring out the game on my own without consulting a walkthrough (more on that later).

If you like puzzles then boy-howdy is this game full of them. The act of platforming is often more cerebral than athletic, and simply making your way from one area to the next while utilizing your abilities is itself often a logic puzzle. Many areas will come down to simple trial and error, and get more frustrating as the difficulty ramps up further into the game. These at least keep the game from becoming boring but can leave you feeling fried after long sessions. I mostly enjoyed the puzzles and was able to get past them before my frustration reached a boiling point.

But all good things come to an end, for now it is time to discuss what this game does wrong and how it manifests towards the end to turn what was formerly an enjoyable, well paced experience into a grueling chore with sometimes pointless rewards.

I said before that I was committed to trying to solve all the puzzles and figure out where to go without a walkthrough. Well, I broke about 90 percent of the way through in the haunted manor level. This area is already enough to break a lot of people, but what got me was some stupid rolling ball puzzle where it looked like you had just barely enough room to make a jump with pixel perfect timing. After failing several times, I looked up a let's play and it turns out there was another way to do it that's far easier and doesn't involve perfect timing. My fault for getting tunnel vision, but the layout of the manor and constant deluge of enemies was already keeping me from thinking straight. It's easily the worst area in the entire game.

The next part was after the area boss in which you have to ground pound a spot in the boss room with no indication you're supposed to do so just to retrieve the object of your quest. I've said before in a previous review that I hate unintuitive stuff like this.

But it gets worse.

The penultimate dungeon contains one of the worst boss fights I've ever seen. How bad is it? Well, a commenter on Youtube said it was as bad as The Bed of Chaos from Dark Souls. I concur. The fight itself is just one stupid puzzle that continually punishes you while giving virtually no indication of what you're supposed to do to win. F--- it, whatever, consulting a video on Youtube again just so I can get past it since there's no instant win button.

Once you're past that nightmare, the true bad guy reveals himself, and it's just some random generic dark lord. I mean, I know this game is just light-hearted, silly story telling, but c'mon, at least give some foreshadowing for the epic villain reveal. Then you enter the next area, and--WHOA, did I say this game was light-hearted and silly? F--- that noise, we've gotta send the young hero into an astral realm of cosmic horror that looks like something straight outta Darkest Dungeon. I bought got neck whiplash from the sudden tonal dissonance. Granted, it's not as bad as the eclipse from Berserk, but close to it, and with no build up.

At this point, you've regained your human form along with a dash maneuver that allows you to dodge attacks with careful timing. And it's at this point you remember that your human form can not only do a four-hit combo attack but also slash upwards, something neither the frog, lion, nor dragon forms could do. I guess humans have more dexterity, but what pisses me off about this is that game teases you at the very, very beginning with these useful combat moves only to take them away and not give them back until the very end. Do you know how many airborne enemies there are in this game? Do you know how useful an upward slash attack would've been for dealing with them?

Whatever. You make your way through the final area until suddenly the game decides to gate keep you from progressing further until you've collected the pieces of the golden sword and golden armor and reforged them. You find pieces of golden equipment (sword, shield, armor, bangle, boots) scattered about the game and are able to forge them into equipment once they're collected, but I hadn't found enough of a single item to forge even one. Now the game is telling me I can't wrap this up until I've done some backtracking. This is like wanting to see the series finale of a show only to be shown a clip show episode. It's a cheap, lazy way to pad out the run time.

What they ought to have done at the very, very least was had you defeat the final boss, then roll credits, then do post game content to collect the remaining pieces of the golden sword and armor so you could do another dungeon to fight the real final boss and see the true ending. This was very frustrating and by then I had checked out and just wanted to get it over. Back to Youtube to let an LP handhold my way through to the end. At least I only needed the sword and armor.

Once you've done that, the game decides to let you proceed further. The final boss isn't very hard, but fighting him is, again, like a puzzle that takes trial and error. I was so done I just followed the walkthrough like a paint by numbers. And when it was all said and done, the impression I got from Monster Boy and the Cursed Kingdom was that development got lazy and possibly rushed for time towards the end. Still, an overall good game for fans of the genre.