Gaming Zelda, But With Mind-Bending Perspective Puzzles - We Take 'Cassette Boy' For A Spin

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BitSummit, held in Kyoto every sweltering hot summer, plays host to an incredible amount of indie developers from across the globe. As you might expect, it can be rather hard to stand out – so much so that it was even difficult for us to curate a list of impressive Switch games down to only 10 titles this year. However, Cassette Boy, with its muted Game Boy-like color palette, exuded so much retro charm that we couldn't help but play it more than once, chatting with the sole developer Kiyoshi Honda whenever he had a moment to spare from the hordes lining up to play his game.

We sat down with the Nintendo Switch version of Cassette Boy for our first go around, later coming back to hammer through some challenge levels on a Steam Deck. A brief tutorial kicked off the story mode, teaching us how to rotate the camera using the left and right triggers.

Simple, right? We thought so too until we learned that anything we couldn't see simply didn't exist. If we pushed a block behind a wall and rotated the camera so we couldn't see it, we could walk behind that wall unimpeded as if the block wasn't there. After rotating the camera so we could see the block again, it once again stood in our way.

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Honda calls this the "The Schrödinger System." What you can't see in Cassette Boy doesn't exist: the only thing that matters is what you can view on the screen. As you can imagine, this mechanic sets the stage for some absolutely mind-bending puzzles, and we experienced a few ourselves but not before we got a grasp on some of the Zelda-like mechanics.

Cassette Boy truly began when our little block-headed avatar woke up from his tutorial-themed dream. We realized we no longer had the ability to rotate the camera. Outside, we found a quaint little village with a handful of quirky NPCs to talk to, including one that lamented the loss of her cat, Luna.

Heading north of the village we discovered a sword set in stone. A knight nearby claimed he was the legendary hero that would wield the legendary sword, but when we claimed the weapon for ourselves, he lamented that the sword probably wasn't so legendary after all.

West of the village we found another knight that tasked us with slaying a few cube-shaped slimes hopping around the nearby forest, as you do after you've found a random sword. He gifted us with a key once completed, which we used to unlock a door further in before we climbed into a large tree stump that warped us to another zone.

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Does that all sound familiar to you? Because it did to us. We stopped to ask Honda how much games like The Legend of Zelda influenced him, and he said it wasn't so much Zelda that inspired him to make the game, but rather the fact that he wanted to make a game that simply felt 'indie.' In that regard, we commended him: Cassette Boy definitely felt like an indie-inspired Zelda game as we continued on in the demo, eventually looting a pair of headphones that would allow us to 'focus.' This focus unlocked the ability to rotate the cameras once again.

From there, we rotated the camera rapidly to unlock a cube-like object with a bow inside it, allowing us to shoot distant slimes and switches, and continued onward, solving a few simple, early-game puzzles before stumbling upon Luna the cat…who promptly morphed into a giant, cube-shaped cat monster.

To defeat it, we had to rotate the camera quickly to generate wind which powered small turrets that rose out of the ground, firing off round bullets. By the time we felled Luna, we were quite dizzy playing on the small Nintendo Switch screen.

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Here the story demo ended, and when we came back later to try the 12 levels included in the challenge mode, we got a taste of what puzzles await us later in the adventure. The final challenge, for instance, took us a while to solve: we had to hit a switch to lower a gate, but it could only be activated by standing on it. When we stepped off, the gate closed. The solution? Back up onto the switch by pulling a block behind us, thus obscuring the switch once it was pressed down – effectively erasing it from existence and keeping the gate lowered. Very Zelda.

These two Cassette Boy demos showed just enough charm and creativity to have us genuinely excited to play more when it releases later this year. Though a launch date hasn't been confirmed, Cassette Boy looks like the perfect little indie darling to play an hour of here and there, or complete a couple of clever challenge levels on a lunch break.

Though we might not recommend playing in handheld mode, as we're still a little dizzy from all that spinning.