Gumball in Trick or Treat Land Review - Game Boy Vibes, Both Good and Bad
It’s genuinely a surprise to get an opportunity to cover a game here that doesn’t straddle the traditional boundaries of a new game. As Gumball in Trick-or-Treat Land isn’t just a new game, but it’s a new game developed for the Game Boy Color, which means it’s not aping 90s nostalgia and whatnot, but directly channelling that style in crafting this adventure.
Something which I found both a blessing and a curse.
You play the titular Gumball, bought from a candy machine, but instead of being gobbled up, you find yourself slipping into Trick-or-Treat Land, a mystical land filled with living foodstuffs and more.
Gumball’s journey home puts them on a quest to recover a set of mystical patches, which your local friendly Scarecrow needs in order to cast a spell, which sets them travelling across the land, meeting the eccentric folks and taking on quests while getting into Trick-or-Treat scraps.
These fights play out as you’d expect – you’ll alternate turns with your opponent in performing various attacks and actions. You’ve got your main attack, but you will also acquire a variety of spells as you progress through the game. I’ll admit, I wasn’t entirely a fan of how they’re earned. In most RPGs, you unlock new spells as your character levels up – giving you more options when fighting your way through tougher encounters as the game goes on.
Here, you have to undertake a side quest to find missing books. If you’re not the most patient of players, you might ignore it, but that will come at your peril, as stumbling into boss encounters without some of those spells can spell doom for you in no short order. I wish it had not been framed like this, while I’m sure there’ll be plenty of players who’ll want to do all the things, I can’t help but see some skip these and make it harder for themselves as a result.
You can also recruit partners, too, which won’t necessarily make up for not having a party, but I found them limiting. The biggest way is that they don’t level up or power up like you. So while you can improve the power of your own attacks as the game goes on, they’ll be fixed in what they can do.
I also found it didn’t help with the large degree of randomness being applied to their action, as I couldn’t reliably make a strategy for winning those tougher battles sometimes, which meant my best plan was to hoard as many restorative potions as I could.
Where Gumball in Trick-or-Treat Land stumbles the most from the limited resource of being a Game Boy game is its story, and how it pushes you through it. Unlike RPGs on modern systems, the hardware doesn’t have the resources for a world map or journal, so you’ll need to note things down to start with.
Despite its relatively small world, there were times I found myself utterly bewildered about what I needed to do next. While there’s a vendor who will sell clues for a small fee, these only provided the most vague of pointers, and I couldn’t help but feel I was chasing a needle in a haystack sometimes before realising what had opened up and resumed my adventures with a snap.
It also didn’t help that I found myself travelling the whole map to complete quests, too. Though there are fast travel systems, I found they didn’t do much to alleviate the repetition that set in, and it wasn’t long before I felt like I was drifting on autopilot as a result.
Which is a bit of a shame. Though the writing didn’t do anything for me, there is an attempt at giving the world of Trick-or-Treat Land some character, both in the locales and in the other characters you encounter. I imagine that for the right audience, that’s going to hit hard and feel incredibly comforting and nostalgic.
But not having grown up with these kinds of RPGs, I can’t help but feel it flies over my head somewhat, which is a shame, as maybe I could have forgiven some of the frustrations if I found myself more engaged with it.
Gumball in Trick-or-Treat Land goes out of its way to offer an experience that strays away from the classic 8-bit RPG tropes of difficulty and grinding, and for the most part, it works on that front. Despite that, I can’t shake the feeling that it really needed some tightening up on the pacing – especially some of its quest Macguffins ended up being rather trivial to acquire, compared to those which put you against one of the game’s bosses.
If you’re someone with fond memories of hiding under the covers with a Game Boy as a kid, you might get a lot more out of it, but if that wasn’t part of your youth, as was the case for me, then it might leave you cold.
Gumball in Trick or Treat Land was reviewed on the PC with code kindly supplied by the publisher.
