The Dragon Always Wins
The town I grew up in had a disco that was, by local standards, legendary. My mother brings it up occasionally—apparently a few minor pop stars had played there over the years, which meant nothing to me but clearly marked the place as significant for the adults around me. We kids weren’t allowed in, except once a year at Carnival, when the venue ran an afternoon children’s party and we arrived in pirate and ninja costumes and drank orange juice until we were buzzing and shot each other with cap guns. The actual draw was the arcade machine shoved into a dark corner of the room: Wonder Boy in Monster Land. One Deutsche Mark per attempt. We burned through coins and died to the same dragon every time, over and over, until we ran out of money or got dragged home.
A few years later I chose a Sega Master System over a Nintendo Entertainment System—a decision I’ve had to defend periodically ever since—and one of my first purchases was Wonder Boy in Monster Land. Now the attempts were free. This did not prevent me from dying to the exact same dragon at the exact same point, indefinitely, without any financial incentive to stop.
Monster Boy and the Cursed Kingdom revives that lineage with genuine affection for the source material. The premise is simple and deliberate: a boy named Jin is trying to stop his uncle Nabu from cursing the kingdom, transforming between animal forms—pig, snake, lion—each with different abilities, moving through a colorful sidescrolling world that looks like someone spent years getting the light and density exactly right. The humor is gentle, the platforming is clean, and the whole thing has the pacing of a game that knows precisely what it is and feels no pressure to be anything else.
If Red Dead Redemption 2 has recently made games feel like homework—which is a legitimate and understandable response—this is the correction. It’s out now on PlayStation 4, Xbox One, PC, and Switch. The dragon is in there somewhere. It’s waiting.