207. Captain Silver (Jorudan, Famicom, 1988)

Captain Silver is a Famicom port of a Data East arcade game that was released one year prior in 1987. You play as a young sailor who is looking to find the titular Captain Silver's treasure. While gameplay takes the form of a pretty standard action platformer, the most interesting part of Captain Silver is the strange amalgam of western literature that it draws its world form.

At the beginning of the first level you are in a European village that is beset by wolf-men. Fine so far, but then The Cheshire Cat from Alice in Wonderland drops down from a tree to attack you. Later in the city square, the pied piper summons rats to attack you, and then at the end of the first level, you walk down a dock, the background cuts to black, and you have to fight a Frankenstein monster as the boss. At least Castlevania kept it fairly consistent with its grab bag of monsters, but it was still entertaining to play through Captain Silver wondering who I was going to run into next.

I just wish I could say I had as good of a time with the gameplay as I did with the world. You are armed only with a knife, and most enemies take multiple stabs to vanquish. Thankfully there does not seem to be much of a limit on how many times per second you can stab, otherwise the game would be unplayable and enemies would trample you pretty quickly. But because you have such a short reach you're just waiting until enemies are close and then stabbing like a madman, which I guess feels like what I would actually be doing if I was assaulted by all manner of literary beasts.

The action of the game does not feel great; the stab is limp and the jump is pathetic. There is a weird jumping stab animation where you thrust upwards. Mercifully, the game does allow you to visit shops to upgrade your weaponry, so you can pretty quickly have a longer range beam attack, though most enemies close in so fast it's not the lifesaver it seems at first. While Captain Silver feels oppressively difficult at first, once you hit your head against it enough times, you start to find pattern and ways to avoid enemies. I thought I had to take a huge amount of damage to reach the second boss, only to retry rough times to eventually reach the boss with more health than I started with.

4/5, an interesting platformer held back by its bad action