Despite what’s implied by the title, Hermano isn’t actually the name of the character you play in the side scroller of the same title for the Game Boy, best optimized for the Chromatic from ModRetro. Rather, you play as Nano, who rises from the grave furious that a demon has kidnapped his beloved hermano, Spanish for brother. It’s not a huge twist on the usual paper-thin Game Boy platformer plot, rescuing your sombrero wearing brother instead of a princess. But it’s just enough to feel quite innovative, in addition to setting up a silly yet satisfying punchline after beating the final boss fifteen levels in.
That’s not a huge number of levels, and for a $40 price tag, might be stretching it. Although just the ROM alone is a more reasonable $15. But Hermano packs a lot into these levels in any case with some genuinely excellent level design. I wouldn’t call any of them misses (although 1-2 made me resent the game a lot early on because the key was in a very silly piece), but the hits more than make up for the low points. The game makes a lot of good use out of flipping the action upside-down, forcing Nano to tread familiar ground hovering between two different forms of gravity with some very slick momentum and well-defined physics.
Like any platformer for a Game Boy sized screen, Hermano can be obnoxious with enemies spawning just out of sight. Although a beneficial glitch (enemies disappear off-screen but Nano does not) takes a lot of the edge off of these more frustrating portions. Indeed, just about any frustrating portion has tricks to get around it. Nano’s standard head tossing attack can be spammed at close range, for example, making enemies with seemingly unfair projectiles surprisingly easy to deal with via aggressive play.
The one questionable design element is the bombs as a collectible weapon of limited use, simply because some sections can’t be solved without them. In general Hermano isn’t too unreasonable about getting more. I wasn’t sure what the exact drop rates were, but when the obvious comparison is a game like Mega Man, it’s easy for Hermano to look good by comparison. On the flip side, for the truly determined old school side scroller fan, Hermano might be a bit easy. The main choke point for me, level 5-1, was more tedious than difficult, such that I didn’t really want to use continues to play through it again when I died in level 5-2.
Thankfully, continues will just respawn you right at the final boss fight. This probably wasn’t necessary, although the fairness is appreciated. It also compensates for Hermano lacking any features like save files or a password system. But then, replaying the game from scratch got to be gratifying, because with every new playthrough, I understood the game just a little better, and frustration gave way to visceral satisfaction as I knew where I was going and what to expect. This made the earlier levels more fun through the repetition. I could viscerally feel the improvement in performance even though I wasn’t timing myself, and knowing the game took less time made it much easier to pick up and play, as you do with a Game Boy.
All of this is well-complemented by the excellent sprite work in Hermano, with the hero doing a cute little blinking smile as he jumps and even the grim reaper looking well-defined and cute. For a game that’s quite literally about charging into the depths of hell, Hermano has a very cartoonish quality in its presentation. This goes a long way to disarming the booby traps in the level design. You may have five hit points, but it’s not the damage that kills you so much as the knockback.
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