Prayer beads and purgatory: Why Taito's Bonze Adventure deserves your attention

If there’s one complaint you could make of the 2D platformer’s golden era, it’s that too often the games resigned themselves to the same settings and tropes. This would’ve been okay for those soaking in the arcade experience, but through the lens of retrospective emulation it can become a bore.

The information age has given retro gamers the gift of endless media, an ever-expanding catalogue of games past and present; it’d be a touch ungrateful to complain about too much of a good thing, right?

Well despite this embarrassment of riches, I’d bet that if you had an exhaustive list of platformers, you’d get a little tired of the same gun-toting military men shooting fictional terrorists of ambiguous origin. There are just so many of these scenarios flying about the genre, it can get exhausting combing through the unremarkable abundances of a once revolutionary industry. For every 10/10, there’ll be at least 10 titles you’ll forget after playing.

Yet there is one massive positive to this litany of platformers because once you find a diamond in the rough, you’ll definitely notice.

The 1988 title is unique in its setting, if not terribly innovative with its gameplay, trading bullets for prayer beads in a tour of the ancient-Eastern inspired afterlife. The player assumes the role of a lone Buddhist monk as he travels across seven different hells to confront the mythical King Emma.

This game deserves your time, it’s a rare case of an arcade platformer selling itself not on what it does, but entirely how it does it, switching from bubbly to brutal at a moment’s notice.