For developers who grew up playing old platformers from the NES and SNES era, these games are often sources of inspiration. The authors of Kaze and the Wild Masks, for example, do not hide the fact that they are crazy about Donkey Kong Country and wanted to create something similar. Fortunately, the Brazilian studio PixelHive everything worked out – this is a wonderful platformer, full of surprises, references and various mechanics.
Hare instead of monkey
In the role of the bunny Keyes, we must save the islands, divided into three dozen levels, from the curse. There is no plot as such, except for the introductory video, but you don’t feel the need for a story. You just need to know that the curse has turned all the vegetables into monsters, and fierce carrots and angry tomatoes will become almost the main obstacles in the heroine’s path.
What was she famous for? Donkey Kong Country and why is she so remembered by so many?? Not long ago, the authors answered this question Yooka-Laylee and the Impossible Lair, an amazing platformer in which everything was done correctly: the locations are completely different, the situations are unique, there are secrets, and the difficulty is not entirely childish. IN Kaze and the Wild Masks all this is also available, except that the originality is lacking.
There is a lot of variety here – if the first, introductory location is a banal level from a classic platformer, then everything becomes much more interesting. A level with slingshots, a level with moving platforms and obstacles in their path, a level with a hurricane catching up with the heroine, a level with rising acid, a level with a slippery floor… I don’t even want to sit and remember which games had exactly the same conditions – you just go through the episodes one after another and have fun.
Additionally, each level contains collectibles https://mrvegascasino.co.uk/login/ and secrets. There are two time trials, where there are also interesting ideas, like killing all enemies without landing. There are four letters of the word KAZE, for which you sometimes have to risk your life in the hope of getting to them. The secrets are hidden very well – on the one hand, their location is not always immediately apparent, and on the other hand, you don’t have to rub against every wall trying to find them. If you look closely, you will notice either a strange bunch of pixels, or a hole in the wall or a platform with which you can get to the bonus.
Upon completion of the level, several medals are awarded: one for finding all the letters, another for participating in both time trials, and a third for collecting hundreds of crystals, of which there are usually a little more at the location. But that’s not all – a separate bonus is awarded for passing without damage, and when you restart the episode after its completion, you can take part in a race against time. Usually I’m not very keen on such entertainment, but here I wanted to clear each level 100%, fortunately the conditions are not so harsh and the same “speedruns” in most cases are completed on the second try.
Flow of ideas
The design of the locations is not the most outstanding and is unlikely to surprise you with anything, but each episode is thought out to the smallest detail. Enemies are not thoughtlessly placed, neither are traps, and this becomes especially noticeable during time trials, when the correct use of skills allows you to perfectly jump over an enemy or reach the next platform. The hare doesn’t have many abilities: a jump, a slow dive after it and a forward dash that serves as a blow. Other skills are added to this depending on the situation – for example, if there are ropes in a location, the character clings to them with his ears.
The masks in the title of the game also provide new techniques, but only in certain episodes. Trying on the appearance of a shark, the hare will learn to swim underwater, and in a tiger mask she will be able to jump off the walls. And when she dresses up as a lizard, the game actually turns into a runner – the heroine runs non-stop and gains a double jump. Opportunities to transform on the fly, as in Monster Boy, not here – masks simply dilute the gameplay, briefly offering the player new opportunities. Without the appearance of a shark, for example, the heroine only swims on the surface of the water and dives shallowly – at such moments the game surprises with other mechanics.
Even if you try to find flaws here, it will be difficult to do so. The controls are very convenient – there have never been situations when the game did not respond to clicks and because of this I died. The difficulty is moderate, you won’t have to get stuck in the same place for a long time. Even if difficulties arise, you can switch from standard mode to simplified mode, where there are more save points. But there is no need to do this – here, unlike Donkey Kong Country, there is no limited number of lives, and even in normal mode the heroine has the opportunity to survive the first wound.
The game looks charming – even if it’s not the most luxurious pixel art, look at Kaze and the Wild Masks Nice. The characters are well animated, the locations are varied, and all sorts of effects like heavy rain, wind or a fire in the forest look decent. The musical accompaniment is great – you probably won’t want to listen to it separately from the game, but it sounds great during playthrough.
For collecting all the letters in a level, a bonus picture opens – not a great prize, but the work is nice.
Kaze and the Wild Masks turned out to be a very pleasant surprise – one might think that this is another faceless platformer, of which there are hundreds on Steam and on consoles, but you get extremely positive emotions from the game. Of course, it is a little cramped within the framework of the spiritual successor to Donkey Kong Country – in the same Yooka-Laylee and the Impossible Lair the developers tried to mix different genres and recreate the familiar formula a little differently. Here is a literal citation of the original source in some places. Be that as it may, this doesn’t make the game any less amazing – it’s a wonderful platformer that risks undeservedly going unnoticed.
Pros: a wide variety of situations makes the gameplay very exciting; good location design with secrets and collectibles in each episode; excellent complexity and convenient controls; it’s hard to resist the urge to return to familiar levels and take part in races against the clock; nice visual style.