The Game Boy might be over 30 years old, but it remains one of the most beloved retro systems. Despite its age, there’s been a steady increase in indie releases, thanks in part to GB Studio — a drop-and-drag tool for making games and an influx of new retro-focused handhelds. But 2023 has been a particularly strong year for the console. An upcoming Game Boy Color title, Dragonyhm, looks set both to raise the bar for the current wave of titles and round off a stellar year for fans of Nintendo’s iconic handheld.
We can thank the pandemic for Dragonyhm. Chris Beach was working in real estate when the COVID lockdowns put a tight squeeze on his day job. He used the time to realize a long-held desire to create an RPG for the Game Boy. The result was Dragonborne, which Beach released himself under his newly-minted Spacebot Interactive publishing imprint. The company would go on to handle the first run of Deadeus and begin production of Dragonborne DX for the Game Boy Color. But thanks to some new features in the latest version of GB Studio, the project soon took on a life of its own.
“It started off as just a color version of the original Dragonborne. I thought it’d be a quick job, colorize it and re-release it. But with all the new features of GB studio, we went down a rabbit hole, and we’ve ended up overhauling pretty much everything in the game,” Beach told Engadget. The result is Dragonyhm, a larger RPG with new graphics, reimagined sound, improved mechanics and more levels to explore. “We’ve got plans for five [games] at the moment, and they’ll be released over multiple consoles, not just not just the Game Boy.”
In the time-honored retro RPG tradition, Dragonyhm begins in our hero Kris’ home. His mother wakes him with worrying news that his father Kurtis, the kingdom’s best dragon-slayer, is missing. Worse, there are rumors that monsters in the dungeons have begun to stir. How long before they awaken and wreak havoc on our hero’s once peaceful lands? No prizes for guessing whose quest it is to find and save Kurtis and in turn, the entire kingdom.
The first moments of the game do overlap heavily with Dragonborne, but it’s not long before the two start diverging. In the original version, there’s a simple puzzle very early on to acquire an object. In Dragonyhm, the same task is much more dynamic and with more interesting mechanics.
Playing the game on an Analogue Pocket, with its impressive Game Boy Color screen mode,…