Like it or not, time passes. Today turns into tomorrow turns into the next day, and all of a sudden Mario 64 is almost 30 years old. It’s maybe a bit ridiculous that so much time has passed and somehow Mario 64 is still considered one of the single best 3D platformers ever made, and even taking off the nostalgia-glasses it holds up incredibly well against the Mario Galaxies, Spyros, Psychonauts, Banjo-Kazooies, and hundreds of other games that wouldn’t have been anything like as good if Mario 64 hadn’t defined its genre. It’s fairly obvious by now nothing is coming along to take Mario 64’s crown, but Kero Quest 64 takes a good, hard look at what that game did right and is more than happy to play in its sandbox.
There’s An Art To Getting Retro Right
Kero Quest 64 is a 90s-style 3D platformer, which isn’t so much about the look of the thing, with its low-poly art style and repeating texture patterns, as it is the smaller, more dense levels with multiple objectives in each. Big wide open worlds that stretch on forever are nice and all, but the traversal time can be a bit much and memorizing the layout a major challenge in its own right. The real secret of 3D space is just how much of it there is in even a more constrained level, and the demo of Kero Quest 64 is a reminder of how satisfying that can be to explore.
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There’s not much unique in the demo, and that’s perfectly ok. You play as the blue frog Kero and basically have most of Mario’s moves from Mario 64- Jumps that chain together for increased height, a slide-jump for extra distance, a quick turnaround jump for extra height, etc. Kero’s also got a spin attack instead of Mario’s punch, so those dive-bombing jerk jet-gulls just require good timing to dispatch rather than needing to worry about facing them while on a thin platform high in the air. Rounding out the basic abilities is Kero’s tongue-lash, useful for grabbing onto distant bars and sending him flying towards them. Getting up to speed with Kero’s move-set will be fairly instantaneous to anyone who’s played a 3D platformer, so while it’s not a bad idea to play through the demo’s short tutorial area just to get a feel for handling it’s fully skippable if you want to get straight to the adventure.
The real secret of 3D space is just how much of it there is in even a more constrained level, and the demo of Kero Quest 64 is a reminder of how satisfying that can be to explore.
The demo is comprised of five areas, each with a number of diamond-shaped shards to track down. Some are earned through platforming challenges, others are found in boxes that can be opened when you’ve grabbed enough collectibles, and the tower area even has some puzzle-platforming with blue and red platforms swapping their on/off states when hitting a switch. Toss in the need to backtrack to get everything and Kero Quest 64 shows off a good variety of objectives, all distinct from each other in the way a good platformer should be.
Kero Quest 64 is currentlyrunning a Kickstarterthat’s already cleared its initial goal, with the plan being over twenty levels but looking like it should fairly easily hit a stretch goal that adds more content beyond that. The demo is linked off the Kickstarter page so it’s worth a visit to play a platformer that couldn’t have existed in 1996 despite feeling like a refugee from that era.
