Toni Island Adventure

Over the years I have really enjoyed seeing the homebrew section of video games grow in the way it has. Where it was once a niche area of video games, it feels like it’s expanded in the eyes of people that weren’t aware of its existence a few years ago. It’s such a wonderful scene too, keeping old systems alive by creating new experiences through some fun titles that can really innovate on the games of the time. 

Of course, this popularity has meant that certain games styled on old system aesthetics get released on mainstream systems and services, with this being the case for Toni Island Adventure, which gained a release on Steam. Created specifically for the Game Boy and heavily inspired by games such as The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening, it promises a chance to go back and experience a new adventure under the excellence of the Game Boy Color palette, sound bites and 8-bit graphics. 

The game starts promisingly, with an intro extremely reminiscent of Link’s Awakening, with the main protagonist – a dog called Toni – washed ashore on a strange island after being capsized through a powerful storm at sea. He soon comes to learn he has found Salamino Island, a land occupied by dogs and, once upon a time, cats too. 

This prompts an adventure to find a way home to the mainland, help residents in need, deal with the super-rich and hopefully stop the island from being destroyed by the island’s volcano erupting. This is achieved by exploring the island and fulfilling conditions to complete quests, solving puzzles in the game’s dungeons, defeating bosses and gaining a much-needed dungeon item. 

With this being a Game Boy Color game, the controls are simple and use only the A and B buttons. This leads to easy but restricted gameplay, especially in combat. The enemies Toni will come up against will only take one to three hits, but it’s their movements that threw me off the most. That and the difficulty in placing Toni in the right place to hit them properly, which ended up happening more frequently than I would have liked. The enemies pack a punch too, taking rather big chunks of health on every hit, resulting in me dying more than I was expecting. 

Thankfully, we have save points scattered around the island to record progress, and although the game does not include auto save, it will mostly remember where you died, respawning you back at that spot instead of at the start of a dungeon or of a multi-tiered puzzle. Though, if you shut the game down, it will start you at the last save point, so remember to save often! 

One thing we learn early on is the islanders love for pizza. Everyone seems to go nuts for it, Toni himself, and if you find a colossal pizza in a treasure chest. It will gain you an extra heart of health. In the pizzerias around the island, Toni can thankfully also buy slices of pizza to top up health on the go; just no pineapple, apparently. that’s a big no-no, which disappointed me massively, as I am a pineapple pizza fan (please don’t hate me!). 

The dungeons are mini in size and won’t take too much of your time to get through. With simple puzzles, like sliding obstacles in a certain order to clear the path, they won’t get too taxing either.  It would have been a great chance to have some slightly more innovative puzzles for the dungeons; I felt like we’ve seen these types many times, but by sticking to the inspirations of the game, the puzzles only manage some of this innovation in the last dungeon. 

Outside of the dungeons, you can go fishing – once you’ve bought a rod – and use the boating system to fast travel around the island. There’s a very basic map, which has been stylised beautifully, which lives on your pawphone. Throughout the adventure you can add numbers to many of the NPCs of the game to your pawphone, and you can call them back for help, advice or if you’ve forgotten what to do. Cool little feature, even if I didn’t use it that often.  

There’s also camping and a day/night cycle, which is incredible to see in a Game Boy Color game but feels very much unnecessary to me. You can camp in certain places, which does heal you, but that is the only benefit. The day/night cycle doesn’t really bring anything to the game apart from some lovely colour palettes to look at. I was never impeded by the time of day, and as far as I noticed, none of the NPCs left their spots to go to bed. 

Visually, Toni Island Adventure fits in perfectly with what you would expect from a Game Boy Color game. Sporting lovely pixel environments from beaches to a city, the care and attention are clear, and it was a delight to see. Though, you could see borders around the building and, more apparent, a different coloured block surrounding the tops of trees, which really stuck out and took away from the otherwise splendid aesthetic. Sound design was perfect too, with that crunchy chiptune music and sound effects recreated beautifully. Each area has its own theme, which was much appreciated, though they did become repetitive very quickly, and many times I was very grateful to be in a new part of the island. 

Before I go on, I just want to remind you that the limitations of creating such a game are many. The file size of the entire game came in at 73 MB! So, it’s understandable that there are a few rough corners to the game. But there are a couple I feel that you need to be aware of before considering jumping in. The first is that the game can feel a little jarring at times, with harsh cuts to some scenes, slow transitions to others and just an overall sense that it could have been done with a tiny bit more TLC.

The second comes from the game’s translation from Spanish to English. There were a lot of typos, missing letters and random spaces throughout, which did lead to some problems following the story sometimes.  I had to stop on a few occasions to figure out what was trying to be said, and although this isn’t the greatest scenario, the majority was fine and understandable. But I’ll take this over an AI translation any day, and it did give the game a little bit of character.