Clu Clu Land has barely any reason to exist. It was made to capitalize on the maze game craze that started with Pac-Man, but took such a different approach to that style of game design that it just fell flat in almost every regard.

You're supposed to explore a "maze" of hidden objects between a series of poles and expose these weird Zelda rupee-looking things, which is NOT self explanatory and ends up feeling ridiculously abstract in a distracting way.

The control scheme of swinging yourself around poles is novel, but when combined with the character automatically moving forward and the weird task that you're assigned to do, it just is not fun to play.


This is a weird purple-y blemish on Nintendo's history. It has hardly been revisited or reflected on in any capacity, and there's VERY little incentive to want to check it out in the modern day, since the gameplay is just dwarfed by the games it tried to improve on.