I’ve been scrolling through that ridiculous itch.io bundle a lot recently. As I expected, I’ve never heard of 99% of the games there, but sometimes something catches my eye and a quick play of Rex: Another Island drew me in.
It’s a pretty plain platformer in the open-world style common in the 8bit days. There are shades of Jet Set Willy and Chuckie Egg 2 here, and it’s really very good. Of course, there are modern additions like restart points, infinite lives, warps and a double jump, but the feel is of those games I loved as a kid. Just without the colour clash.
It is quite a bit easier than those games, but then, I never did complete them anyway and that was frustrating so I appreciate being able to get to the end here.
There’s actually three endings, it seems. The easiest is for just reaching a particular point on the map, the second is for finding all five giant crystals and then reaching a different point, and the final one (and the only one I didn’t get – yet at least) is for collecting all 777 rings. I’m about 690 rings down, though!
