We’ve successfully barricaded ourselves in, but we forgot what we were going to ask for as ransom.

Another in a series of titles from Mega Cat Studios and Retrosouls, Plyuk reminds us time and again that NES games, however much we may laud them, are incredibly limited. The cartridge size capped out at 1MB, or approximately the same size as a PDF of your guiltiest fanfiction. While you may have spent days or weeks reading over Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, most NES games only had about an hour of actual gameplay. It just felt longer because the system was slow, the controller hurt your hand, and nothing was on television since your parents wouldn’t spring for cable. A lot of people wax nostalgic about the games from the Family Computer era, but the truth is, most would be little more than browser titles by today’s standards, which is probably why there are multiple emulation sites that do just that.

Plyuk is a confusing game, narratively. Plyuk is the name of…a convict? A science experiment? The opening scrawl only tells us that Plyuk is captured somewhere and has the power to clone itself, and, naturally, it’s trying to make a break for it. This might be fine unto itself, but when you reach the end of the game (in less than an hour), Plyuk returns home (?) to its house (??) to find the key under the doormat, where they left it (???). Then we get the credits, and the game is over. I understand that there isn’t a manual for this game, so we need to inject some kind of reason that we’re playing, but what the buttery hell is this? Old Towers might have been barebones, but the story of “there’s treasure here once every hundred years, let’s steal it” is bald and straightforward. Did Plyuk get pinched for a DUI?

Wheeeeee, I am above the law!

All rationality and logic aside, Plyuk is a fairly decent puzzle title with a fun mechanic. As stated above, Plyuk’s whole deal is being able to make copies of itself, which spawn under the player. This means you can make a ladder/tower of yourself to reach certain areas, since Plyuk cannot jump. You also need to be careful, because the clones are very tangible and create a barrier, blocking you from passing through them. Plyuk will also clone itself should it fall onto spikes, leaving a handy corpse behind and regenerating at the start point. The objective for each stage is to get all the keys and exit through the unlocked door, which is as simple as it comes. If you back yourself into a figurative or literal corner, just mash the start button to give up and try the stage again.

You will figure out the basics of the game from the first three stages, and then you’re off to the races. While other minor elements will come into play – speed arrows that hurl you through the air, dissolving platforms, blocks that appear once their outline is passed through – it comes down to Plyuk’s replication ability and the limitations therein. You can make twelve copies of yourself, and that’s it, but the “death” copies don’t count against the limit. You sometimes need to get creative in order to reach certain aspects (like purposely impaling yourself to restart), but nothing here is going to boggle your mind too much. Even the very last stages are a matter of counting and figuring out basic patterns as to how the game will progress as you move. It’s quite linear and encapsulated.

As an NES release, Plyuk is really well designed from a visual and audio aspect. The soundtrack, while not utterly bombastic, still gives some nice, quirky ambiance as you move about from stage to stage, and it does have a minor shift in tone as you transition from certain zones into others. It has a good drive to it that gives a solid background of loops to enjoy while also hearing the crunchy noise of Plyuk moving about the stage. While this is far from groundbreaking, it is at least something, which is more than I could say for Old Towers.

I felt the Earth. Move. Under my feet. No, it’s a problem, there’s no longer any foundation.

Additionally, Plyuk uses the right amount of pixels to make a chunky little mascot who is, dare I say it, cute. Plyuk looks good as it bobbles around the stage, and it only gets terrifying when you have a screen full of his clones and nowhere to go. The stages are well designed and take advantage of the vertical movements to give more room for the game to breathe without needing to reinvent the wheel. There’s plenty of color and detail that gives a feeling of…well, actually like a dungeon. Again, I’m very confused by the narrative. Like other Mega Cat Studios releases, this one is on cartridge and, as such, needs to conform to what the NES is capable of delivering, not just what is potentially doable within an NES game build, if that makes sense.

But nothing from start to finish in my experience raised any sort of curiosity or novelty other than playing an NES game in 2026. It’s fine, and is the most Cornflakes kind of game that I can think of. You play it, it gets played, it never crashes or fails, but it also never excites or sucks you in. Without a progression map, you sort of just reach the ending and are struck by the fact that you’ve finished with very little fanfare or recognition. If someone handed me a glass of water and then expected me to rate it, I might have more to say than I do about the general experience I had walking around in Plyuk.

Goodbye, sentient copies of myself! I leave you to existential dread while I venture onwards!

I will say that, if you’re just here because you’re a collector and are looking to get a physical copy of Plyuk to tick off another box on your ongoing vault of modern old games, then go right ahead. The gaming market is completely insane in terms of prices for physical and complete games, and I’m sure there are a few people who look at the sixty dollar price tag for something that has a runtime of one episode of Rescue Me and think “Awesome, done deal.” It’s your money, you’ve probably already made up your mind, you’re just trying to figure out if a second copy is worth having for play’s sake. Which, frankly, I don’t think it is for what you need to give in order to get it.

Too often, people around the world have decided that video games and their ranking are a purely binary world, and it hurts my head. If a game isn’t destined to be the greatest title you’ve played all year, then it must be abysmally bad, and that cannot be a healthy way to consume anything. Plyuk is undeniably middle to middle low in terms of what you get. Sure, the gameplay is decent, but it’s also incredibly short and asks you to do nothing more than walk, spawn, and continue. The music exists, which apparently is a high-water mark compared to other things, but I wouldn’t own the soundtrack, nor would I recognize it in a chiptune lineup. Out of the literally hundreds of NES games that exist, I would put Plyuk right in the center, and even then, there are some worse games I’d go towards first for amusement.

Plyuk is available now on the NES and PC.

Reviewed on Retroarch via PC.

A copy of Plyuk was provided by the publisher.