I am a very, very simple creature. I enjoy pixel art, particularly when it’s well done. I like meta humor. I love novel concepts. And I’m never upset when characters are cute for no other reason than to be cute. So when I discovered Internet Generation during an internet deep dive, I was instantly smitten by the graphics and the presentation. The fact that it was coming to Nintendo Switch was the cherry on top, and I instantly reached out to Platinum Rocket to get my hands on this game. Having played this 2.5D arcade brawler to the bone, I can safely say that I should always trust my gut and only play games that I want to from now on, because I am such a happier kid with Internet Generation in my life.

You, the player, have stumbled into an online server called Happy Otaku Server because you did a net search for…happy otaku server. This server, however, is under some serious fire. The mods have all lost their minds and can’t seem to agree with each other, with one mod hellbent on banning anyone who wasn’t a founding member of the server. You really want to hang out here; it looks cool, there are great graphics, and some maid wants to share NSFW moe pictures, and you simply need that in your life. As a result, you’ve made it your mission to talk to the server owner and get them to be cool, save the server and maybe relax the NSFW rules so you can get more moe pictures. Yes, you might be a dirtbag, but you’re the dirtbag this server needs, not what it wants.

See? Who else but a dirtbag would ask such important questions?

Naturally, the server owner is an obfuscated entity, and so you need to go through the different server mods in order to finally figure out who’s in charge and how to change their mind. This is how the gameplay unfolds, as a result: enter a room, usually do a lot of combat, and then move into the next room. Pulling directly from tried-and-true brawlers like Streets of Rage or River City Girls, Internet Generation does what it can to intermingle storyline, character progression, and tons of one off jokes in order to keep the player engaged, though the fighting is what ultimately makes the entire package work.

Out of the gate, I want to say that Internet Generation is an incredibly competent brawler that seeks to do its own thing without reinventing the wheel. Each room has a set number of enemies to clear before being able to move on. The rooms have different themes and biomes, so enemies have plenty of places to move around, sometimes hiding behind trees, standing on the other side of a water obstacle, or just generally bounding about, causing you to accidentally step out of bounds. The server clearly can’t render the realm forever, so the edges of some battle spaces are black and will damage you if you dawdle too long. Stay on your toes and keep moving and everything should be fine.

The initial encounters are all pretty straightforward, starting with slimes and slowly evolving into bigger slimes that manifest as anime girls. As you delve deeper into the game, though, you get a better variety of enemies, each of which brings some new wrinkle to the table. Jellyfish will fly through the air and only be vulnerable if you go up to meet them OR they slam down to attack you. Flowers spray a dust that prevents you from attacking for a few moments, much to my great alarm. And those godawful Grass are just off camera, able to repeatedly heal the enemies while you go crazy trying to figure out WHY THEY WON’T DIE?! And yes, these are all animal/plant names, but, like the slimes, they’re still just anime girls.

Pictured: trees (not enemies), gang of slime girls (enemies), QR vending machine (door) and that goddamn Grass (blight).

Internet Generation barely gives you a heads up when something changes between levels, so be sure to check your pause menu early and often. Each new enemy comes with a photo and a description of how they attack, which is handy. Even more useful are the glossaries of new attacks that get unlocked as well, plus the details of how the buffs that get dropped can be expertly used. Learning how to do the attacks is a must, because adding in all the different moves and aspects to help solidify your powering forward is the only way to not choke and die.

Full disclosure, I did play this game on normal and dipped back down to easy for one particular boss fight (I’m terrible at Minesweeper), but Internet Generation is really quite generous. The number of deaths you have for normal don’t matter at all, and you can instantly respawn after being overwhelmed. The buffs that are obtained in each battle are plentiful, and can make the fighting easier or even over in a second (I picked up four Wipeouts and promptly murdered everything currently active). Not to mention the rhythm of fighting comes naturally and inherently the longer you play, and the intuitive nature of how the combos work together is really quite impressive.

The speedlines means I took too many boosts, oh God, oh God, do you guys all hate me???

Despite growing up with the SNES era and being more accustomed to face buttons, Internet Generation made me feel right at home relying on the shoulder buttons instead. There’s a reflexive nature to squeezing your index fingers, and making sure that a huge number of combinations that ultimately only use those four buttons for very different attacks is impressively inventive. Once you get the hang of the timing, you can do enormous amounts of damage with incredibly fluid movements, shifting from dashing and striking to lobbing projectiles and doing aerial punches. As long as you’re on top of your next move, the whole situation is tight as a drum.

This is only further assisted by the choice to do everything in pixel artwork. The developer 岛叶游戏 took great care to not only craft sharp and cute looking sprites, but also to put in an eye popping amount of animation work. From diving into portals and doing a happy dance of level completion to being in fully formed poetry through action, the art direction cannot be understated as a love letter to all things 16-bit and gorgeous. I particularly loved how detailed the portraits were, and how a lot of those details were subtly baked into the chibi sprites that make up a majority of the world.

Dear localizing team: this was a brilliant way to handle interpretation, full marks.

The soundtrack of Internet Generation is also good, if a bit forgettable. A combination of electronica and piano works, there’s something that’s very familiar about the ambience of Internet Generation, but I don’t mean that in an accusatory way. Rather, I feel that we see a lot of independent games nowadays relying on similar scoring methodology, which evokes a specific feeling. In this case, the mixture of “high” and “low” instrumentation gives it both an artistic and a rougher aural aesthetic, which goes hand in hand with pixel art nowadays. While it suits the tonality of what this game is, it also feels a bit safe. Enjoyable, but not particularly dynamic.

I think the only shortcoming of Internet Generation is the text size. This game is optimal for playing in handheld mode, and I want to appreciate the how and the why of this creation and not just “let’s punch everything that moves.” As a result, there’s a lot of reading between the fights, delivered in speech bubbles, and the wording gets pretty dense and protracted as more and more details of the rise and fall of the server are unveiled. It doesn’t help that you often have to keep hitting A to keep the conversation going further and further instead of it just being an unbroken interaction. I love this on my Switch Lite, but it looks best up on the big screen.

Not the weirdest proposition today.

This little piece of Netizen fanfiction is quaint, engaging and really stands on its own two feet. I love the ideology and the execution, and the combat is an ideal length of time. The buffs can be wild, but they never get overly available, and I was constantly impressed that I kept finding new ways to fight and new enemies to encounter. Internet Generation is a brilliant pastiche of the gaming worlds of old, and perfect for anyone who grew up with Maple Story, Ultima: Online, or even MUDs. And, if you just want a pixel-picturesque brawler, we’ve got the perfect server for you.

Internet Generation is available now on PC and Nintendo Switch.

Reviewed on Nintendo Switch.

A copy of Internet Generation was provided by the publisher.