Title: Kudzu
Developer: Pie For Breakfast Studios, Mega Cat Studios
Publisher: 8-Bit Legit
Release Date: April 5, 2024
Platforms: Nintendo Switch, Game Boy, Itch.IO
Reviewed on: Nintendo Switch
Price: $4.99 (digital)/$39.99/$49.99 (USD) for Game Boy cartridge

If you grew up in the 1990s and loved video games, chances are you had a Game Boy. Nintendo’s first major handheld gaming system was a cultural phenomenon. From Tetris to The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening, the Game Boy brought electronic entertainment to consumers in a green hue, bathing gamers in adventure and excitement–backlight not included!

For those looking to revisit the nostalgic era of their gaming past, the latest offering from 8-Bit Legit is just what the Doctor Mario ordered. Kudzu, from Pie For Breakfast Studios and Mega Cat Studios, brings the 8-bit adventure of The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening via a surprisingly deep story that involves evil plant creatures, aliens, and ghosts.

Fans of Kudzu can order their own physical copy, including the classic Game Boy version here. Digital copies are available on the Nintendo eShop.

Synopsis

Pie For Breakfast Studios asks, “Who dares to explore the depths of the Kudzu maze: is it just an out-of-control invasive plant, or is something more sinister afoot?”

Players “take control of Max, a serious go-getter and the best student of master gardener Zoen, who has just gone missing in the kudzu labyrinth. The wisdom that Zoen imparted on Max will be put to the test as players use their wits and gardening tools to navigate the vines.

During the journey, players will find a host of weird and helpful characters, as well as kudzu-controlled creatures who will stalk you through fields, gardens, forests, and even a haunted house!”

Gameplay

Kudzu plays exactly like you’d expect a 90s-era Zelda game to play, with a few notable exceptions. This non-linear adventure allows players to explore ruined fields, gardens, forests, villas, and more.

Players collect a variety of gardening tools in the game that help in the fight against the kudzu and allow for deeper advancement into the sprawling world.

These tools include: Rake, Machete (with two additional upgrades including “The Master Machete”), Gardening Hoe, Sandals, Gloves, Compass (multiple), Letters, and Health Potion Containers

There are no options to equip items, as all actions are mapped to either the A-button or the B-button, which mostly works well for the game. The animations give the player a sense of completing different actions while still only pushing one or two buttons. (Though adding sound effects for the slashing machete or flipping of switches would increase immersion.)

However, a dedicated item slot or additional button mapping for health potions would greatly improve quality of life; currently players must hit the pause button and navigate to the health potions to manually restore health, which would be fine if not for the terribly glitchiness of the controls.

There’s a significant delay between the button input and the action on the screen, which can lead to players over-inputting the select command and bypassing the health potion. At times, the controls become momentarily unresponsive. This problem was persistent throughout my gameplay and led to a lot of frustrations with the menu design. Beyond fixing the glitchiness, Pie For Breakfast could simply program a button command to refill health and bypass the menu altogether.

Combat is standard fare for the genre, but engaging and fun if you enjoy these types of games. Players fight the twisted creatures lurking in the kudzu, such as snakes, giant bugs, living plants, and other monstrosities. The enemies gradually increase in difficulty as the player progresses, which makes returning to areas from early in the game quite enjoyable as players will feel a sense of how powerful they’ve become.

The boss fights in Kudzu are where the game’s combat shines brightest. These bosses have creative and varied attack patterns which keep players guessing, but never feel too difficult. The challenge is appropriate to what a casual player might want with this type of game and the unique qualities of each of the ten bosses add charm to the game, many of which call back to the forebears of the genre.

Kudzu also offers its share of puzzles and side quests, though none stand out as particularly challenging; regardless, these add fun to the gameplay and are creative enough to engage the player during a casual run of the game. I do wish some of the side quests could have been developed a bit more (such as the pen pal quest).

Sadly, the gameplay in Kudzu isn’t entirely smooth. The game has a significant number of glitches which interfere with movement and attacking. The bounce-back effect when hit by enemies sometimes clashes with other programming and can cause the player to become stuck or rapidly move in random directions without the ability to control or recover. Other times, enemies disappear when initially hit, becoming invisible while still attacking.

Some of these programming gaffs can be exploited to cheat the game, as is the case with the pause glitch. Whenever a player pauses, all enemies on the screen will reset to original positions (and any dropped loot disappears–frustrating); savvy players can use the pause glitch to escape enemies when backed into a corner, or even to easily kill enemies by respawning them at their original location and slashing with the Machete (damage doesn’t reset with the pause).

Music

The music of Kudzu is nothing short of incredible. Composed in the classic chiptune style, the soundtrack from Brandon Ellis has surprising range in tenor. The dungeon music is unique to each location, as are the songs for each region in the game. My personal favorite is the song in the save location, a small tent containing a bed for restoring health and a radio to call in the player’s progress, effectively saving the game. The song is both chill and expressive, and I found myself leaving the game on in the background while I did other tasks like reading and writing.

I hope the team at 8-Bit Legit decides to release the soundtrack separately, because it’s one for the collection!

About Pie For Breakfast Studios

Pie For Breakfast is an indie studio headed by Chris Totten, an award-winning game designer, author, and assistant professor of game design at Kent State University; he’s has been making games professionally for over a decade.

“Kudzu is a game I’ve wanted to make for a long time both because of my love of action-adventure games like Zelda and Metroid, but also because I thought an evil, world-consuming invasive plant would make for some really cool gameplay,” Totten said. “Kudzu wraps its tendrils around the level layouts, the puzzle elements, the enemies, everything: and that was a really cool design theme to play with.”

“The game came from a bunch of ideas that my wife and I pulled together, including her brother fighting off invasive vines in their yard with a machete and my dealing with a kudzu-infested building site in architecture school.” Totten said. “The game was something we thought we’d never have the opportunity to make until we found the GB Studio engine (and its amazing community) and thought – Hey! Kudzu would make a great classic-style Game Boy game!”

One of my favorite secrets in Kudzu is that you can actually find Chris Totten and his wife Clara in a hidden village in the game. This reminded me of the Chris Houlihan room in The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past!

Final Score

The game design for Kudzu is fantastic and deserves a nearly perfect score. The developers at Pie For Breakfast Studios along with Mega Cat Studios nailed the classic Game Boy experience. While I completed the game on Switch, I found myself wishing I had one of the retro cartridges the game is available on, because the magical transformation felt nearly complete.

Playing Kudzu reminded me of those summers in the 90s, riding in the back of my parents’ car while adventuring through Koholint Island in The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening. The effort to profit off of nostalgia is everywhere these days and usually these products are “more light than fire,” rarely granting the warmth of memory. But Kudzu somehow delivers; and folks my age who long for one more chance to explore and quest like the days of yesterday will want to give this game a chance.

If only the developers had released Kudzu without the bugs and glitches. These are the proverbial fly in the ointment that nearly ruined the experience for me. During my first playthrough of the game, a required item randomly disappeared from my inventory, and I was unable to recover it, even by revisiting the place it spawned. This created a game-breaking glitch as I was unable to progress further into the game and had to start entirely over. Not the best first impression for a game review.

Nevertheless, the game’s beauty and fun outshine the worst of these programming errors and make Kudzu worth playing. I truly hope the game will get a patch that solves many of these issues, so players can experience the game as intended and the developers will future proof the game as the work of art it is.

Boss Rush Network scores Kudzu three and a half stars out of five.

David Lasby is the Editor In Chief for Boss Rush Network. His favorite video games are The Legend of Zelda, Metroid, and the Aliens franchise. You can find him on Twitter to talk all things Nintendo, sci-fi / fantasy, and creative writing.

Featured Image: 8-Bit Legit