2-Bit Cowboy from Crescent Moon Games, takes its graphical style from the Nintendo’s Gameboy. It makes use of dark, colorless sprites and a green-tinged background. The classic look fits well with the mechanics of the game and is reminiscent of the early portable platformers of the late 80s, when Mario was little more than a shaded sprite hopping across the Mushroom Kingdom and Kirby was a colorless ball floating through the clouds.
The game features twelve levels and in each of them your main tasks is to take your cowboy (or cowgirl) through the stage to a shack at the other end. But it’s not as easy as going from point A to B — each level is filled with enemies, quests and collectibles to distract you on your journey.
The quests themselves are represented as posters in the game, and collecting them will issue you a challenge for the current level. The challenges themselves vary from collecting an x amount of things (ducks, coins, etc) to removing all the bandits from a level and finding and shooting all the glass bottles, and in your endeavours to complete and obtain quests you’ll find yourself scaling peaks and venturing into deep caves and underwater lakes, exploring the surprisingly large world wrapped in a retro skin. You see for yourself here.
