Startropics

I didn't really want to go to bed this morning, so around 4am I decided to start playing random NES stuff. I settled on Startropics and was immediately charmed. It's really simple and linear and holds you hand tightly, but it's also a lot of fun. There's overworld exploration and conversations with NPCs, then you're handed a quest and you venture into some dungeon or similar to carry it out. There it zooms in a bit and you have a very Zelda-esque series of rooms you need to progress through. There are monsters, switch puzzles (albeit very basic) and boss encounters.

It's got a bit of the stiffness of the 8-bit era, but on the whole it plays well. I think I'm going to stick with it.