I want to explore Kirby’s forgotten land

 While I am more of a table top gamer, I married into a video gaming family. Nintendo in particular. Before my marriage, I couldn’t have picked Kirby out of a lineup of Space Invaders aliens and now I’ve played at least three different Kirby games.

(Kirby is a silent but heroic pink blob who can gain the powers of enemies who eats alive. And he is somehow adorable instead of a soul-destroying horror)

So, when the demo for Kirby and the Forgotten Land, every member of the household who isn’t a cat played through it. I had to look up to find this out but this is the first Kirby that’s a 3-D platformer, as opposed to a 2-D one.

And if you’re like me, you need someone to explain that a platformer is a game where you follow a path full of obstacles, puzzles and enemies. And a 3-D ones means the developers can make the environment more complex.

I know there is a _lot_ that the full game will have that the demo doesn’t even hint at. However, one thing that drew me in and made me want to play the full game is the environment.

In the opening cutscene, Kirby and other inhabitants of his pastoral Arcadia are pulled through a portal into a new world. And it is a very promising world. 

Kirby finds himself on the outskirts of an abandoned , overgrown city. Flowers growing through the cracks in the sidewalk. Crumbling skyscrapers with vines. We are talking on sad, quiet end of ‘After Man’, post apocalypse. Nature is reclaiming what once was civilization.

And it sure looks like a world made by and for humans, not the adorable creatures of Kirby’s normal worlds. Although I’m pretty sure they will inherit it.

I don’t know if the game will be able to live up to the promise of the setting. My Kirby experiences have had the little pink guy in playful environments. This is Kirby hanging out in a world steeped in tragedy and loss, a forgotten land… Hey, that’s where the name comes from!

I know that the game play is going to consist of jumping, and pushing and eating the souls of your enemies and wearing them as your skin but it’s happening in one evocative place. I do want to guide Kirby on his adventures but I also want to explore this world.