This game absolutely luxuriates in its existence as a video game. You can practically see the designers standing around a whiteboard jotting down ideas for how to use the quirks and foibles of this little adventure game engine to tell as many stories and make as many jokes as possible. The combat system is purely deterministic which might be annoying in a lesser game, but here is used to great effect both cinematically and from a design perspective—grinding is replaces by moving through the game's many subplots and exploring its areas while still capturing the joy of numbers going up.

And what better platform for a game that wants to show off its materiality than the original Game Boy? Such a tremendously underpowered little thing, barely able to hold a game together, but Kaeru no Tame manages to flip that into a strength. Every new interaction and mechanic feels like a magic trick: the game pulls a zip line out from behind your ear in the final act with a flourish, and it startles and amazes precisely because you can tell that it's at the limits of what the system can accomplish.

They don't make 'em like this anymore, and I'm not sure they even can—at least not from a major video game studio. Now it's up to hobbyists and indies to keep these platforms alive and spin their restrictions into gold.