Thanks to 8-Bit Legit for the review code

Title: Kudzu
System: Nintendo Switch (eShop)
Price: $4.99
Release Date: 04/05/2024

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Story

In this homebrew Game Boy title, you take control of a man named Max, who sets out on a quest to investigate the strange, out of control growth of Kudzu! A pretty simple, yet charming story to give you an excuse to go on a grass cutting adventure, and it remains decently silly throughout.

Presentation

This is yet another 8-Bit Legit port, with a similar wrapper. This being a GB title, you only get one color palette choice, but it’s an accurate shade of green so it didn’t bug me much being restricted to the DMG colors. You once again have several border options, but oddly enough you still have TV themed borders here despite this being a handheld game, and I feel a faux-Game Boy border would have been a neat substitute to shake things up. Like prior ports, the borders do not save upon closing the game and reloading it, and there are no filters, which is a bit of a bummer since a dot matrix one would be pretty neat to have.

You also have only one screen size to work with here, but the aspect ratio is suitable and the pixels are still very sharp, so I didn’t have any problems with it on either my Switch Lite or TV. Per usual 8-Bit Legit ports, you also get a manual scan to read through here with some helpful tips and info.

For the core game, Kudzu is decent looking with small sprites and visible environments, though you’ll quickly realize that this is a GB Studio game once you start reading the text boxes and feel the typical jank when interacting with objects. Despite that, I felt the developer made use of the engine pretty well visually, and entering the dungeons will give you some really lovely title cards, and several key art scenes are portrayed in-game with some equally great full-screen pixel art, so some of these can be quite the looker even with the engine limitations.

That being said, I did notice a few animations getting stuck every now and then, and a boss fight had the boss break apart in segments when it clearly wasn’t meant to, so there’s still some jank to be seen here. Eventually I got used to look of Kudzu even with those initial GB Studio impressions, since the rest of the game’s visuals manage to do a pretty darn good job of fitting the 8-bit Game Boy vibe well, but I can’t say the same for the sound. The BGM tracks were catchy enough, although nothing too memorable, but the sound effects were almost completely absent to the point I wondered if this was because of emulation issues.

And apparently, it was, despite me finding other videos of the game being lacking in most sound effects outside of a few pickup noises here and there. Last Wednesday, a patch went out that fixed the game up and now your attack has a sound effect, which gives the combat the oomph it needed. Sure, the sounds that are here are very basic sounds, but I found Kudzu to be way better with simple sound effects to let you know what’s being hit/what isn’t rather than the near silence this port had beforehand, and just that one change made a whole world of difference.

Gameplay

Kudzu is an action RPG akin to the 2D Zelda games, and it proudly boasts to be inspired by the likes of Link’s Awakening and such. Obviously, the scale is nowhere near as big as that game, but Kudzu does do a decent job of being an admirable game where the focus ends up being more on exploration and solving puzzles in the overworld versus beating up tons of monsters to progress.

See, your hero doesn’t use a sword or any sort of major weapon to fight the enemies and cut the Kudzu growing out of control; he uses a machete, and thus that means you’ll not only be slaying enemies that get in your way with a farming weapon, but also cutting a lot of grass and solving various puzzles, such as toggling switches by pushing them, manipulating plants to bind up a switch and forcefully pull it, finding electricity sources and powering them down to open up a door, and finding lost keys to pair them with the door blocking your path.

The puzzles are rather simple, but they’re still pretty fun. You have four hit points to start out with in Kudzu, but you can recover them easily by resting at a campsite, which is also where you can save your game by dialing in with the radio. (Also akin to prior 8BL ports, you can’t use save states, but you don’t need them here as save tents are frequent enough and sleep mode is a thing) Otherwise outside of saving your mushrooms to purchase the occasional map or item at a shop, there’s little else to focus on during the dungeons besides clearing a way to the next boss, and I quite enjoyed this puzzle focus as a result. While there are still combat screens, the bulk of these dungeons are puzzle-based, and I feel for a game with a scope of this size, that was the right call on the developer’s part.

Speaking of combat, the little bits you do pull off show pretty clearly why the game doesn’t make you use your tools all that often; this is very clunky combat. Most basic enemies die quickly, but tougher foes and bosses take multiple hits as you’d expect, but more often than not I’d encounter weird hitbox situations on the boss fights, such as one case where an early game boss split into squares when they clearly weren’t meant to do that.

Still, what’s here is effective enough to get the job done, and I was rather relieved that puzzle solving and poking around screens was the bigger focus here. Once you get the compass these dungeons are pretty darn fun to navigate, though I will admit I spent a bit longer than I’d have liked without the compass, but mapping the dungeons out on my own was a fun multitask in the meantime.

Conclusion

Ultimately, I had a decent time with Kudzu, especially when taking into account how it was less action heavy and more focused on the exploration and puzzle solving. It still has a lot of jank to it though, but even still the difficulty is reasonable, there are plenty of save points to make use of, and the puzzles are ultimately still fun to solve, even if the bosses can be kinda glitchy. As a fun action puzzle romp, I had fun in my time with Kudzu, and with a bit more polish and some extra touches, this could have easily been one of the best GB homebrews out there.

Still, as it stands right now, Kudzu is still a very fun game that you’ll have a dedicated afternoon tackling and enjoy yourself, while wishing there may have been more in regards to the action elements. Link’s Awakening, it is not, but Kudzu still stands out as a fun memorable romp I think fans of that game will still enjoy anyway, especially if you like the puzzles or exploratory aspects and want something more simple to kill an afternoon with, and don’t mind a little bit of jank here and there. All in all, a fun nostalgic throwback!

I give Kudzu a 7 out of 10.