Game: Spud's Quest

I'll be honest: I kind of freaked out a little when I saw that Spud's Quest was a straight-up homage to Codemasters' iconic adventure game The Fantastic Adventures of Dizzy. There was probably no other video game I played more when I was a kid, and it took my parents and I a solid three years to finally complete the fearless egg's adventure (back when there were no such things as save points or online walkthroughs). I saw the resemblance in Spud's Quest the second I booted up the game, but after actually playing it, I found that our little potato's big quest to help a prince-turned-frog is so much more than a simple homage to an adventure gaming great: it's a fantastically retro adventure that rightfully stands on its own as an essential crash course in inventory-based adventure gaming.Players familiar with the wildly fantastic worlds of Dizzy the egg (and in particular, The Fantastic Adventures of Dizzy) will find that the majority of Spud's Quest plays out like a giant fine-tuned homage to one of gaming's greatest and oft-forgotten adventure heroes of old. Blatant echoes of Dizzy can be found at nearly every turn in the game: from the starting environments like the treehouse village and the rocky mines; to the familiar items you'll find and their overall uses; and even right down to the layout of the land itself, with the lake leading into the town to the left of the starting village. For compulsive Dizzy enthusiasts like myself, it provides a trip down nostalgia lane like very few other games I've ever played."But what's great about Spud's Quest is that for every reference the game gives to its Dizzy inspiration, it does three other things that are refreshingly new and unique to the adventure itself, and some of which I even wish we had seen way back in our prime Dizzy days. On a more basic level, you've got your much-needed save points, Zelda-like health upgrades, and a flurry of achievements and optional collectables to find. On the deeper end of the spectrum, you have engaging new environments like broken windmills and parked stagecoaches, and a slew of more complex features that accent the overall adventuring gameplay in a really wonderful way. Spud's Quest represents what The Fantastic Adventures of Dizzy could have been like had the creators kept the series going well into the 2010s, and added in some timely new features.