by Locomalito and Gryzor87.
This is a brand new game for the MSX, the 1983 home computer mostly sold in Japan, probably most famously associated with Metal Gear. It’s by Locomalito and Gryzor87, the long time collaborators behind many fantastic retro inspired arcade games (including: l’Abbaye des Morts, Maldita Castilla, and my personal favourite, The Curse of Issyos).
Mutants From The Deep doesn’t pull any punches – the game expects you to complete its 7 stages on a single health bar, with no continues. It promises around 25 minutes of game length – “once fully mastered”. This is the sort of thing that, for a lot of people, is going to be totally off-putting, and fair enough. Personally, I find it kinda refreshing. This is a game for a niche audience, and it leans into that, hard.
What I will say for it is this: Locomalito and Gryzor87 do not make hard games for the sake of being “retro”. They have a long history of making deliberate, thoughtfully designed games that push players towards absolute perfection. It’s very easy to make a mess of this sort of thing, and really, really hard to design a game that gets this right – but somehow, Locomalito has managed to design several of them. So, I think making a more determined effort than usual here might be worthwhile.
The windows version just came out yesterday, and you can download it from here:
[Download for Windows (locamalito.com)]
…but I recommend the officially ported MSX version (by Manuel Pazos and Fernando García), which is how the game is really meant to be played.
[Play online (HTML5 MSX Emulator)]