Venture kid is an 8-bit retro action platformer made by FDG Entertainment where you are supposed to stop Teklov, an evil scientist, who has apparently been doing evil experiments. As soon as you boot the game up, you get a little two minute-ish intro but it does a poor job at shedding light on anything. When you actually click to start the game, you’re instantly thrown in without any sort of tutorial. I was forced to figure out everything on my own, such as movement, first assuming it was standard “WASD”. Then trying the arrows only to find that just the left and right arrow worked. I still couldn’t figure out how to jump so was stuck for at least 10 minutes until finally figuring out that jump is “Ctrl.” After an annoying struggle with the controls, I finally got to enjoy a relatively good platformer that pays homage to older games from the 80’s and early 90’s.

The levels were pretty simple. You have a certain number of hearts for each life and once you’re out of hearts, you respawn at a checkpoint. Once your lives are depleted, you have to start the entire level over. When you first come to the World Map there will be many grayed out areas, but as you complete stages, more will unlock giving you roughly 8 immediate places to visit and complete.

Each enemy has a unique set of moves and abilities, but will attack in a specific pattern, so if you wish for a no-damage run, you’ll need to grind to figure out the timing. As for myself, I may have died over 100 times before I finally realized that the little orbs you pick up are the game’s currency. That’s how little it explains anything. In the shop you can buy lives, energy for your gear, and a few other things that FDG Entertainment never tells you about. Only after figuring this out was I then able to defeat the boss and move on to the next level.

Every level has a few select enemies that have a difficult learning curve to get used to, but the bosses are in their own league. Each boss is unique, carrying some characteristics from the mobs in their world but with a much higher difficulty rating. Once you get them to half health, they then get an additional ability to overcome. Fighting them will take practice and the ability to resist an incredible desire to rage quit due to the unpredictable nature of their moves and not being able to time your jumps to avoid attacks. After beating the 8 bosses, you can then advance to Teklov’s flying ship and find that it has an additional set of worlds of its own.

After about 2-3 hours of gameplay, and around 400 deaths, I finally beat the game. It felt like ages due to the sheer rage the game made me feel from the numerous amounts of deaths, making me want to cry myself to sleep, but all-in-all Venture Kid is an enjoyable game. It was fun to hop in and lose track of time, probably spouting every curse word in the English dictionary, but it’s super rewarding when you finally beat that boss who was giving you hell. Good luck conquering this roller coaster of a ride. It was thoroughly enjoyable, rage inducing, but still worth it.

Graphics: 6.0 Old-school 8-bit game but cleanly developed with some good character designs and boss fights.	Gameplay: 5.5 Having no tutorial  on controls or how to play properly, I had to struggle to find out myself.
Sound: 8.0 The music was quite enjoyable. With each world there was a different feel.	Fun Factor: 7.0 Even with the difficulty of the game I still wanted to continue to the next boss.
Final Verdict: 6.5

Venture Kid is available now on PC.

A copy of Venture Kid was provided by the publisher.