Little Nemo And The Guardians Of Slumberland Review – A Little Dream

Over a century ago, 1905 to be precise, a cartoonist by the name of Winsor McKay would create a weekly full page and full color comic strip that would last for well over a decade. It would inspire generations with its vivid, surreal art, and subject matter of a dreaming boy who always seemed to fall out of bed and jolt awake at just the wrong moment. The work inspired homages from other cartoonists, animated adaptations, and even a video game for the NES. That comic strip was Little Nemo, and it rather obviously inspired DIE SOFT, the creators of Little Nemo and the Guardians of Slumberland. Not just to adapt the settings and visuals of the comic – though it has done so excellently – but to also adapt the feeling of those comics for a more modern age.

In Guardians of Slumberland, while Nemo himself is still a young boy, he’s not a child of the 1900s but instead perhaps the 1990s. He’s still a dreamer who visits Slumberland whenever he sleeps, but his tastes and sensibilities are updated. For example, while Flip of the original comics was depicted as a carnival clown, the Flip of Guardians of Slumberland is based on a more modern idea of wild abandon – 1980s pop musicians.

The story of Guardians of Slumberland is that Nemo has suddenly found himself in Slumberland, and it’s been a very long time since he was last around. Slumberland’s castle has been locked up, the princess has gone missing, and worst of all, Slumberland itself is falling to oblivion and will be destroyed forever once dawn next arises unless Nemo can find the guardians, return their scepters to them, and drive back oblivion. As he helps the guardians with their problems and meets up with other Slumberland denizens, like Bonbon and the mysterious Argemony, he learns about the mysterious forgotten dreamer who might be behind the encroach of oblivion in the first place. He is also reminded of the events from his life that inspired and sustain Slumberland, and why many things are as they are now.

To start, Nemo can run, jump, pluck items from the ground, pick up certain enemies, and grab onto handholds, but naturally he gets a series of toys to grant him new powers. Each of these can be found in one of Slumberland’s various areas as you help the guardians, but the game does allow for sequence breaking. Nemo also gets various pyjamas that grant upgrades to various abilities, like an increase in walking speed. There’s even one that makes Nemo impervious to all enemies in exchange for making him die instantly to any level hazard. Nemo also gets several buddy toys that follow him around and provide benefits like being able to read the lore scattered around Slumberland.

Guardians of Slumberland has a very unique method to health and enemy damage. You start the game with three health points. You end the game with three health points. Instead of gaining life ups, the game has Nemo’s lucky coin, which can be upgraded three times by finding four pieces of the coin around Slumberland. Each time the coin’s level goes up, the damage enemies can do to Nemo decreases, to a minimum of one. Healing is also done rather uniquely, in that each time an enemy is defeated, they drop a moon. Nemo can either break these for candy to buy things around slumberland (Nemo loses his candy on being woken up, but can recover some of it by talking to the right NPC) or grab them to fill his moon counter. If Nemo’s been hurt, collecting a certain number of moons will fully heal him, and if he’s not hurt, it will raise his rank, making enemies more difficult to fight, but making moons drop more candy. At max rank enemies get one final attack as six projectile fly from their body on death, so you have to be careful fighting anything. But while at max rank moons automatically break into tons of candy and Nemo sparkles and does a spin jump, like a certain plumber sometimes does. Of course, if you do die it’s not the end of the world, as Nemo just wakes up in his room and you can hop right back into bed to respawn at the last checkpoint you’ve passed, or if you’ve collected enough blue moons for an area, you can use the map by Nemo’s bed to fast travel to any checkpoint you’ve already found.

The enemy design is excellent, with standard enemies being strongly matched to the areas they belong to, and their threat levels scaling appropriately to where in the game they are found. As for Bosses, each one provides a unique challenge and experience, designed around the full set of tools Nemo has at his disposal when you fight them. Some bosses can only be beaten by talking to them, and some are only vanquishable by using their own attacks against them.

In terms of gameplay, everything felt solid. Nemo’s movement speed and jump physics just felt right for the style of cartoony platformer this is. The enemy and platforming challenges are easy to grasp and escalate at an appropriate pace, including new platforming challenges or certain sudden changes to the physics that all make sense. In terms of story, it’s absolutely heatfelt, about childhood nostalgia and memories, and full of those nods without being choked by them. It’s also full of plenty of little twists and turns to be full of surprises that all make sense on reflection.

Little Nemo and the Guardians of Slumberland is a good game, and brings a unique mechanical take to the metroidvania genre, joined together with amazing art design, incredible music, and a heartwarming story about holding onto important memories especially when everything seems hopeless.

Tim reviewed Little Nemo and the Guardians of Slumberland on PC with a code received after backing its Kickstarter. This review is based on the version of the game available at the time of writing and our score will not be changed.