Cassette Boy Review – A Zelda Meets Fez Puzzle Adventure

Cassette Boy Review

Cassette Boy is a 2D Legend of Zelda-inspired adventure game, mixed with rotating camera puzzle gameplay, inspired by Fez. The game begins with the question: “If I’m not looking, does the moon still shine above?”, which is a hint at Cassette Boy’s puzzle gameplay hook. It’s a fascinating genre blend. Read on to find out for yourself if this will be a puzzle adventure worth taking.

Cassette Boy’s presentation is fantastic, but also very odd. The visuals are pixelated sprites with a green color palette, designed to emulate the look of a GameBoy adventure game. The music is comprised of gorgeous lo-fi melodies that recreate 8-bit music sounds. The story is about a little white blob fellow who hears a voice, guiding it to collect moon fragments. Any more info would be spoilers. But the plot is drip-fed, and is very sparse until the end of the game. This entire package creates a creepy retro aesthetic that was an immediate attention grab for me.

Legend of Zelda Top-Down Adventure

Cassette Boy’s base gameplay is very inspired by 2D Legend of Zelda games. The view is top-down. There’s an open world to explore with dungeons and a village hub. Square interacts with NPCs and objects, X attacks, and circle jumps. Triangle does a leap forward that makes the player immune to damage while the animation plays out. R2 performs other abilities such as firing a bow and arrow. The player has an item inventory, and collects items that allow them to unlock new areas. Interestingly, Cassette Boy doesn’t use Legend of Zelda’s progression solely based on hearts and items. It has a more traditional JRPG experience point system where attack, defense, and critical damage stats increase.

On top of being a traditional top-down Legend of Zelda-style adventure game, Cassette Boy is also a puzzle game. Early on, the player gets the ability to rotate the screen with L1 and R1. This reveals that the 2D appearing environments are actually 3D. Players can rotate the camera to look for hidden items. There are eight camera angles, so players can move in 2D or isometric 3D.

Meets Rotating Puzzle

The main hook of the puzzle gameplay is that anything that’s not seen on camera “doesn’t exist”. If something is blocking the player’s path, they can rotate the camera, so the obstruction is blocked from view, and the path can be crossed. If a button needs to be kept recessed to open a gate, the player can move on the button, then move the camera so the button’s out of view, keeping the door open.

The blend of Legend of Zelda adventuring, and Fez puzzle solving makes for a fantastic core gameplay experience. My only complaints are that Cassette Boy is over too soon. It’s a short game, and feels like it was missing some kind of next level puzzle challenge. A lot of Cassette Boy’s difficulty comes from its boss fights and cryptic progression. The puzzles themselves weren’t much of a challenge overall. Most of the puzzles were excellent, but there were a few that felt like they had less thought put into them, where my reaction was “I guess that makes sense”. The occasional answer felt a little undercooked.

Cryptic Progression

Some players might be turned off by the NES-style cryptic progression, but I loved it. Cassette Boy is the kind of game where players have to talk to NPCs to get clues about what to do next. There’s also a lot of backtracking and combing over already explored areas when new abilities are unlocked. I love Metroidvanias and NES-era adventure games, so these elements of Cassette Boy were a real treat for me.

I did hate that Cassette Boy didn’t have map though, and I found it really easy to get lost. I’m sure this was an intended exclusion to go along with the game’s cryptic NES inspirations, but some aspects of the game made this a poor design choice. The GameBoy green color palette makes it so environments are difficult to distinguish between sometimes. And because the player is constantly rotating the camera, navigating the map feels like using a rotating road map. It’s just wrong. The game is small enough that this wasn’t a dealbreaker, but no map led to occasional frustration in a bad way.

What’s Next?

Overall, I really enjoyed Cassette Boy. The combination of Legend of Zelda adventuring with Fez camera rotating was an excellent combo that blended incredibly well. The game has a unique retro visual aesthetic, and gorgeous lo-fi music. Its only issues are minor. Anyone curious about Cassette Boy from the trailer should definitely make the purchase. It’s a short game, but the under $15 price is right. I can’t wait to see what the developers make next!

***PS5 code provided by the publisher***