It’s 1989. You are, despite appearances to the contrary, a kiwi. A seal has captured your kiwi companions including, with sad predictability, your bow-wearing kiwi girlfriend. You must trek across the country to rescue them, but there are things out to stop you: bear things, star things, penguin things riding flying ducks, axe-throwing cats, dank things in shells. Welcome to New Zealand. It’s been waiting for you.
It’s not just there in the title — The New Zealand Story gives you a map of the islands between each level to locate you in Auckland, Rotarua, the Waitomo Caves, ‘Strait Cook’ or Mt. Cook. Its setting is one of the game’s best and most important choices. It doesn’t even matter too much that there’s not that much of a recognisable New Zealand in it. The way that it uses real places as a backdrop but keeps humans very much in that background still gives an exciting sense that its strange goings-on are happening just out of view. It gives a grounding and an individual character beyond that offered by its cute art design and dinky cartoon music, and definitely beyond its gameplay.
On that gameplay. The bright cartoon presentation doesn’t have much in common with Ghosts ‘n Goblins, but it’s another platformer were you fire projectiles and the difficulty quickly gets similar. In fact, New Zealand Story is even busier and more complex, thanks to greater computing power and the ability to commandeer numerous flying vehicles which on more open levels turns it into a kind of free-flowing platformer shoot-em-up. I quickly found myself thinking of Laura Hudson’s fine advice article ‘Your Super Mario Maker level has no chill’, which advised players to take a more restrained approach to Nintendo’s creative platformer creation platform and not to throw everything at a level at once. If anything, New Zealand Story has negative chill.
The level design tends towards equal parts haphazard and sadistic. Enemies appear in a frequency and variety which defies any kind of theme, deadly spikes abound, and abilities and collectibles pile up so your kiwi is scuba-diving and spitting water one moment, fighting an aerial battle from a laser-firing UFO the next. At its best, it can be exhilarating, and you can see the game’s arcade origins in the sense of spectacle and the sense that barely controlled chaos is one way to make repeatedly playing through the same difficult levels interesting. As anything more than an awe-inspiring way to spend 50p, though, it’s hard going. The spectacle comes at the expense of any kind of coherence or feeling of real progression. Worse, there are plenty of places where it has the worst, fiddliest platformer difficulty excesses without even that spectacle.
That brings us back to what the game does best, because its tour of an imagined New Zealand becomes the best incentive to persevere through its peculiarities. It saves the best for later on, the unexpectedly idyllic water-world of the Cook Strait and its rows of smart buildings in particular. There might not be much to it, but its New Zealand story counts for a lot.
[This piece originally appeared on AAA]