Hero's Spirit

In like the early days of the 90s, a lot of games usually came with manuals. more specifically they give you like a brief overview of the characters, some screenshots of the gameplay, and occasionally even a few secrets, and perhaps some concept art as well. This is because in that era due to hardware limitations, they couldn't effectively hide secrets in games all too well, as that would take up a lot of space either during development or in physical cartridge size. This would occasionally lead to rumors about how to get secret stuffs in the game (i.e Mew under the truck, the 151st Pokémon, Jumping over the flag in Mario) and by extension some of them actually being true, but coming at the cost of the fact that there would usually be a lot of dead ends or "nothingburgers" of stories, and so a lot of it feels absurd but not to the point where it feels like it's completely out of focus, and you're left constantly guessing whether or not X or Y actually changed or not. Hero's Spirit is an NES RPG but you forgot the manual and so the only thing you have to rely with is playground rumors and praying, and everything good [i]and[/i] bad that comes with that. This is a game that really made me wish that Steam had some sort of a "Mixed" rating or equivalent, since the good of it is really good, but it is also alongside some painful and sometimes, frustrating design decisions that would be equivalent to the era. I still lean towards recommending this, but I would advise that you also go in knowing at least [i]some[/i] of what the game has to offer, and less go in completely blind.

The premise and presentation seems like a throwaway nostalgia 'look, it's like when games had hard fog of war and grids and simple combat!' but it actually goes so, so insanely deep and really explores everything you can possibly do from a set of rules like this. There are layers of secrets upon secrets and many of which you'll have to see for yourself.