Mutant Mudds

The balancing act that modern games find themselves having to do must be incredibly challenging. Gamers of a certain ilk (i.e., my kind of gamer, primarily) seem to want it both ways: for games to maintain the charm of the retro with the conveniences of the modern. We want games that bring us something new, something exciting, something challenging, while sticking true to the gameplay fundamentals laid down ten, twenty, thirty years ago. I'm as guilty of this as anyone – it's perhaps no coincidence then that I so often turn to Nintendo for my gaming fixes, as simultaneously forward-thinking and stuck in the past as anyone.

That dichotomy threatens to pull apart lesser developers, though. Swing too far towards the modern and you have hyper-realistic graphics tethered to follow the leader gameplay structures and automatic checkpoints every ten seconds; swing too far the other way and you have games that are cloying or precious or, at their worst, without a single original thought to be found within their packaging.

On the retail side of things, this battle is over: the ultra-modern is the only thing that sells in a box (despite the fact that they have pretty regressive design elements, though I've perhaps beaten that particular drum a few too many times on this website). The retro, then, or at the very least the retro-seeming, are only to be sold on digital storefronts; and on the seventh day, he rested…

Some of these exercises in retro gaming can be really fun (I've been having an absolute blast with VVVVVV, for instance, which utilizes retro verisimilitude for hilarious effect), but too often these "retro" designs are incredibly navel-gaze-y or worse, use retro styling as a cover for shitty design (it's basically like the video game equivalent of Pomplamoose, and if you've never been subjected to that particular twee nightmare, consider yourself lucky).

Talk about burying the lede! In any case, Mutant Mudds makes for an interesting study in this dichotomy, if only because it doesn't really play into either category. It's definitely not modern: the game is a hard as balls platformer through and through, discarding modern conveniences like checkpoints and infinite lives. In fact, the only legitimately modern thing about it might be its delivery through the surprisingly robust eShop system, and its use of stereoscopic 3D, allowing your avatar to travel to the foreground, midground and background.

On the other hand, though, it's not the kind of retro that we've come to associate with downloadable services in the last few years. There are no winking nods to absurd elements of video game past; there's nothing in the way of homage (the closest it gets is making its characters look like something out of Earthbound, and even then, only vaguely). In fact, Mutant Mudds very much is a retro game, which is a very different thing from being retro. And it's not even a cool kind of retro, either: the game looks and plays like a middling platformer from the early 90s.

In terms of verisimilitude, Mutant Mudds is actually kind of astounding. It feels exactly like the kind of game one might rent on a whim from a video store in the 90s – oh, not the kind of game you'd actually buy of course – challenging and solid but not particularly amazing. Basically, you run, jump and shoot your water gun at a variety of brown mud enemies, and besides a Super Mario Sunshine-esque water propulsion jetpack, that's about it.

I don't think that capturing a mediocre essence from twenty years ago is quite enough to make Mutant Mudds great (it doesn't seem to have enough of its own ideas or its own ways of pushing this incredibly oversaturated – no pun intended – genre forward), but as a cultural artifact it's incredible. Other retro-styled games might be better games, but few games capture the essence of game development as it existed at the time. If Renegade Kid had perhaps chosen some slightly better influences to riff on, or introduced something more innovative than a 3D parlour trick, it might have made Mutant Mudds a good game rather than a good anthropological curio.