Last month, I talked about Sonic The Hedgehog, and mentioned how, among other things, I found the game’s punishing lives system to be a real drag. And that was far from the first time I’ve complained about difficulty in this series; video games have undergone a pretty big paradigm shift from the industry’s early days when it comes to difficulty, with expectations shifting from “we expect the average player to lose in less than a minute, so that we might claim another quarter from them” to “we expect the average player to beat our game” over the decades. Home console games from the mid-80s through roughly the 00s1Though you saw this shift unevenly throughout the second half of the 90s weren’t trying to extract quarters, of course, but they still tended to operate with the assumption that difficulty was what made games interesting, and it wasn’t inherently bad if many or even most players didn’t reach the end. Probably the biggest driver of this shift was the increasing prominence of narrative in games,2Like the old thought experiments said, it’d be weird for Godfather to stop an hour in and quiz you on what you’ve seen so far and only let you continue if you aced it, so why should games do the same? but even mechanics-focused titles have shifted over the years.

In that respect, Kirby’s Dream Land is an incredibly forward-thinking game. The central conceit is this: what if a platformer let you jump forever? In Dream Land, you have infinite double-jumps, meaning you can effectively fly. This completely reframes the standard platformer, since now pits are super low-tension obstacles. Instead, enemies become the main threat, but even there Kirby remains a very easy game. Your infinite jumps give you great maneuverability, and you also have a very generous six hit points (it was just two months ago I was praising Super Mario World for having ~3!). There are technically lives (5, to be exact) but there are also infinite continues, so a Game Over isn’t especially punishing. I would expect pretty much anyone even gamer-adjacent, even children, to be able to beat this game, which isn’t something I can say about many games from 1992.

But while being easy may hold some novelty value, the difficulty was there in other games for a reason. While the pitfall for difficult games is that the difficulty will cross the line from engaging to frustrating, easy games can have the opposite problem, becoming trivial and boring. So how does Kirby’s Dream Land hold up here? Right off the bat, anyone playing today will notice that Kirby’s iconic copy ability isn’t in this game; that wouldn’t be introduced until next year’s Kirby’s Adventure.3Which is an NES game, by the way. NES games were trickling in years after the SNES came out, a sign to the console’s extreme success. The only real comparison here is to the PS2, which was also dropping notable games for a few years after the PS3. The copy ability is a great way to add interest to an easy game, since there’s an inherent fun and novelty to seeing all the unique abilities Kirby can learn. And knowing what’s to come, it’s hard to avoid the feeling that Kirby’s Dream Land is merely a rough draft.

But still, it doesn’t come off too badly. This game is pretty short, like most Game Boy titles, so there really isn’t enough time for the basic interaction of sucking up enemies and shooting them out as stars to get old. It can hold your interest, even without being especially challenging, at least for the few hours it’ll take to beat. But then, Kirby’s Dream Land does something incredible. After you beat the game once, you unlock4“Unlock” is a word which here means “the game tells you a cheat code to enter in the main menu when starting the game”. I guess these carts weren’t manufactured with save features? extra mode5The game’s name for hard mode. And not only is it very difficult, I think it inadvertently invents the masocore genre years ahead of schedule?

For those who don’t know, masocore is a sub-genre of platformers most closely associated with modern indie games, featuring incredibly difficult single-screen challenges. Think Super Meat Boy or Celeste. But just as important to the best masocore games is how the accommodate their insane difficulty. A good masocore doesn’t have lives, and respawns you a second after each death. It’s a frictionless experience of iteration, of getting a little bit better each time in order to pass a small, discrete challenge before reaching the next one. The core philosophy of the genre is that there is a difference between fun or “true” difficulty and bullshit, and by minimizing the latter you make more room for the former.

Plenty of games in this era were super hard; indeed it was the default. But most of them also wasted your time in service of that difficulty, often through the dreaded lives system. Extra mode isn’t like that. It still has the infinite jumps, the generous hp (comparatively less generous now, since most enemies deal double damage, but still a far cry from the still-common one and two-hit systems in other games), and the continues are still unlimited. So you will die, a lot, but also feel like you’re learning, like you can keep trying, that all your deaths are in service to a greater goal. It’s not perfect; the gaps between checkpoints are bigger than they should be, and in later levels that can be a problem. But still, it works shockingly well.

And part of the reason that it’s shocking is because Kirby games just don’t have the mindshare of most of the other series we’ve talked about here. Sure, plenty of gamers know who Kirby is, but honestly that’s probably more due to Smash Bros. than his actual games. I think a lot of people take their easiness at face value and write them off as simple games for children, which is a shame. Kirby’s Dream Land is doing a lot of neat things, both in the field of super hard games but also in general, and I think it deserves more recognition. Plus, won’t it be nice to play a 30-year-old game without getting mad for once?