The adventure is one of the original staples of the gaming world. These games really hit their stride starting in the 8-bit era with games like Simon’s Quest and Metroid. Rather than a simple platformer, you were instead required to explore a vast area and find hidden equipment, accomplish tasks, and make your way through a story that built as you played. There are a number of variations on this but one of the old 8-bit games that really established the formula was Goonies II.
If you’ve ever seen Goonies, you know it’s about a bunch of kids who set out to find a pirate treasure. It’s a cinematic classic and the NES game turned it into an exploration platformer where you took control of Mikey, the main character from the movie, to free your friends and save a mermaid by exploring, finding new weapons and items which unlock new pathways, and progressing on with them. It’s a tried and true gaming formula that has been in continuous use for a long time.
The Good Old Days from developer Gravity Co, Ltd. and publisher Aksys Games seeks to take that formula and reapply it to the modern day. When we say reapply it, it’s quite literal too. The Good Old Days wears its inspirations on its sleeve with direct references to characters and situations from The Goonies movie. In fact, you play a kid named Sean and you’re fighting to save your home from shady debt collectors (thugs rather than businessmen this time). When you encounter them on your front porch, they give you a day to come up with $30,000 or you’re out of your house!
Fortunately for you, your house is situated on a vast hoard of underground wealth that you can explore to pay back your debts because your deadbeat parents are too lazy to. As added incentive, the thugs have also kidnapped your three best friends and stashed them underground in weirdly inaccessible places, but were strangely too lazy to collect any of the treasure themselves.
The vast majority of The Good Old Days is simply exploring this huge underground full of traps, death-defying jumps, rats, bats, and other dangers. There are a handful of people dwelling in the underground as well that you will come across as you stumble through the darkness, aided only by your trusty magic bombs supplied by the thugs. The catch is that there’s really no direction on what to do or where to do so you’re likely to find yourself stuck underground at a save point with no clear way forward relatively quickly. The biggest thing you absolutely need to know is that you can stand on your bombs, allowing you to jump up to slightly higher platforms with relative ease, although if you take too long, you’ll get blown up. Without this handy trick, you definitely won’t be getting very far in the game however.
You should also be aware that while there’s no cap on deaths, each one costs you three minutes in time, slowly accruing until you start to run out of time to reach your goal. If you’re stuck or haven’t figured out quite what to do, this is a real problem as you are going to die a lot and that time is inexorably counting down as you struggle to advance. Timing is everything in this platformer and enemies, water, fire, and other hazards await you, all massively damaging you with a single misstep. Sure, you can run across power lines and jump spectacularly high, but it’s just not enough without some additional help that you definitely don’t have at first.
As you slowly progress in the game, you’ll collect bits of gold hidden throughout the underground. Some are hidden behind bushes or in enemies, others are in the destructible walls and floors of the levels. Once you learn how to blow things up effectively, you’ll find a ridiculous amount of money fairly quickly. You’ll also likely encounter one of your friends once you manage to wander far enough, allowing you to free Foodie and unlock his abilities to escape. Here’s where things get interesting though. The Good Old Days isn’t your standard exploration and done game. Instead it’s a unique circular exploration of the genre that unlocks additional content with each completion of the gameplay loop. Wait, don’t go just yet! This is not a bad thing!
The Good Old Days is a deceptive game because you’ll reach your funding goal relatively quickly. However, that is nowhere near the end and you won’t have even freed all of your friends yet. That’s because this is a game that’s designed to be completed multiple times in order to actually tell the story. The vast majority of plot is not revealed by the first loop and you’ll instead be treated to a longer story point that then leads you back to the beginning of the game again. Fortunately, things are different this time around and any key items you have located carry over to the next playthrough. The structure of the underground has also changed somewhat and while the basic layout is intact, subtle differences, palette swaps, and new areas await you.
The experience you get depends on your prior interactions and your progression in the previous loop so while you’re still accumulating money and saving your friends, it happens a bit differently each time. The first playthrough is much longer and more challenging than the second, partially due to your increased item inventory and partially due to the alterations of the game that allow you to acquire money much faster. Talking to different people or accomplishing different tasks will change things further for the next loop, creating a slow shift in the narrative and your understanding of events surrounding your dad’s disappearance.
After the first loop you’ll quickly find that you’ve only begun to scratch the surface of The Good Old Days and that’s kind of awesome. Usually alternate pathways in games consist of a handful of dialogue changes and maybe a different ending but here you’re experiencing an actual continuation of the game based on how much time and effort you put in and direct impacts of your choices. That significantly raises the replayability of the game and having items that allow you to effortlessly walk past things like fire, electrical hazards, sewage leaks and more will speed up each loop rapidly. Once you’ve unlocked Foodie, Bruce, and Doc, you’ll be able to use their individual abilities to reach a number of previously inaccessible areas, letting you move further and further through the underground and defeating the crime family set on stealing your fortune as you go.
Made a mistake in a conversation? Fix it in the next loop to help you progress. Lost at a boss fight and went a different route? Come back and try it once you’ve got more experience. What your choices accomplish is unclear at first but the clever structure of levels forces you along certain pathways in order to successfully gather the money you need in time to pay back the thugs and stay in your home while still leaving you room to explore in your own way. Each loop gives you different abilities that let you move through more and more familiar areas easily and subtly highlight new directions to explore that frustrated you the last time. Just keep in mind that the first loop is the slowest and most frustrating and the rest of the game opens up afterwards and you’ll be fine.
The game also tries to capitalize on vintage style in its visuals. The Good Old Days features clear callouts to SNES design elements including fonts from classic RPGs, lovingly created 16-bit style pixel art, and the casual dismissal of reality for convenience of level design. Yes, you can run across the power lines. You can fall for long distances with no damage. Rubber boots magically protect you from all electrical shocks. None of it makes sense but it doesn’t have to because all of it is entirely for fun and that clear disregard for realism enhances The Good Old Days rather than bogging it down. The pixel art is excellent and characters are full of expression, the levels are varied and interesting, and the overall color palette shifts with the loops, creating a visually interesting experience.
The only downside to the game is the video resolution. While you can adjust the contrast to sharpen the visuals, there are no options for pixel perfect vs. CRT filters in the game and you’re forced to experience it like a retro game on a CRT whether you want to or not. Depending on your age and eyesight, this can be a bit frustrating as fuzzy pixels are harder on the eyes as you get older. It’s a shame there weren’t a host of video options included here to add variety and accessibility, but you do get used to the indistinct edges on things after a while, even if they aren’t ideal and playing with the contrast helps a bit.
The music in The Good Old Days is perfectly serviceable, but while you’ll get used to the individual tracks, they’re not the sort of thing you’re going to go out and hunt down the MP3s for or anything. Instead it’s more of a slow exposure that gets the tunes tapping in your head like an old school NES game, which is probably the point in the first place. Sound effects are good though and the overall shifts from area to area in sound help to reinforce the visual changes that you see, making the game slowly more immersive as you progress.
The biggest gripe to be had with The Good Old Days is that the initial loop is a bit frustrating. Without clear guidance at first, you spend a lot of time figuring out the world’s rules by trial and error, making the initial experience with the game a bit more of a letdown. As you progress things become more fun but there are still little irritations like the vines which are easy to jump on but incredibly hard to jump off of. We also encountered a weird fatal glitch on our second loop during the playthrough for this review as well, forcing us to restart from scratch. As of this article, there has been no update to the game resolving the issue, though it was reported and it is unclear whether this is a random glitch or one others will encounter. The hit box can be frustrating too, as things that seemingly shouldn’t hit Sean and his friends definitely do a bit more often than they should and while there’s a degree of precision required for gameplay, the controls feel just a hair too loose and floaty for comfort, leading to repeated jump failures if you don’t get the momentum and button timing just right.
It isn’t the perfect game, but those imperfections manage to make The Good Old Days somehow more representative of the eras it’s clearly designed around and that makes for a surprisingly fun experience after the initial loop concludes. While it can be a bit irritating to replay the same levels, it’s less time consuming each time and ends up slowly warming up players to the unique gameplay loop. Not everyone is going to want to replay the same levels over and over even if they’re different, but The Good Old Days makes this approach surprisingly fun as you get the hang of the purposely retro gameplay mixed with newer aesthetics and ends up being a much more enjoyable experience than the original impressions suggest. At $30, it isn’t a terribly expensive game either and as replayability is a key component of the game, the hours you sink in are enjoyable and fun. In short, the Good Old Days starts off slow but ends up a good time, much like many of the movies and media from the era it represents and it’s definitely worth your time to take a look at it!
This review is based on a digital copy of The Good Old Days provided by the publisher. It was played on a Nintendo Switch in both docked and undocked modes and played equally well in both. The Good Old Days is also available for PC on Steam.
Nate Van Lindt has been a gamer since the days of yore (aka Commodore 64), and has played a bit of virtually everything out there. He's also an avid comic book collector, both vintage and current, and reads a fair amount of sci-fi and fantasy. On top of that, he watches a fair number of movies and TV shows as well. Oh, and he has a family, a full-time job, and lives somewhere in the urban wilds of Southwestern Ontario, Canada, foraging for old video cables and forgotten game soundtracks.