MOM HAS BEEN KIDNAPPED BY A MONSTER
Can you get through a game with only four directions to move and a single fire button? I just did — and had a blast doing so. Rod Land, developed by Jaleco for the arcades and later ported to a wide range of systems, is one of those games you instantly “get.” It operates on an almost primal level, where instinct takes over within seconds.
With one-screen levels, one fairy (or two in co-op), a handful of enemies, some platforms connected by stairs, and a scattering of collectibles, Rod Land employs a setup nearly as old as video games themselves. Your gaming intuition immediately tells you what to do, how to do it, and what to avoid. There are no power-ups, no upgrades, and no leveling systems. You start with everything you’ll ever have. The only resource that matters is your number of lives. All of this makes Rod Land highly accessible, wrapped in a big-eyed, anime-inspired aesthetic of sweetness and innocence.
You play as a cute, pink-haired fairy on a quest to rescue her mother from the clutches of a monstrous captor. Armed with the Rod of Sheesanomo and a pair of Rainbow Shoes, you ascend a tall tower, facing an army of lesser monsters along the way — mostly corrupted plants and animals.
Using the rod, you can ensnare enemies, swing them overhead, and smash them into the ground to defeat them. The Rainbow Shoes allow you to conjure ladders up or down, though only one ladder can exist at a time. Aside from a few rare exceptions, this is your only way to move vertically, making Rod Land one of the rare platformers — like Lode Runner — that completely forgo jumping.
The Amiga version features 40 levels, even more than the arcade original. To clear a stage, you must defeat every enemy on screen. As you progress, foes become increasingly dangerous, gaining ranged attacks, cloning abilities, and flight. Levels often require quick thinking and careful positioning — a kind of strategic shepherding — before committing to an attack.
Collecting all the flowers in a level temporarily transforms remaining enemies into beetroot-like creatures. They won’t attack, but they will attempt to flee. More importantly, defeating them during this window can yield letters spelling “EXTRA,” and collecting all five grants an additional life.
This creates a constant risk-versus-reward dilemma. Do you take the safe route and dispatch enemies directly, or attempt the trickier flower-first approach for a chance at an extra life? Losing even a single life makes the effort questionable — but can you afford not to try, knowing what awaits later?
Interspersed among the regular stages are several boss encounters. These are the weakest part of the game, and the only moments where additional mechanics might have been welcome. Most bosses are trivial until the final form of the four-stage end boss, which on the Amiga version feels unfair and uncomfortably luck-dependent — especially compared to the arcade original. With no continues available, dying means starting over entirely, making extra lives nearly mandatory to see the ending.
Aside from this, the Amiga port — handled by The Sales Curve — is so polished that one could argue it surpasses the arcade original. The music is especially harmonious, the visuals are crisp and garish in the best possible way, with large sprites and beautifully detailed backdrops, and the animation is impressively smooth. The additional levels feel slightly out of place, functioning as a gentler final stretch — unless you’re aggressively hunting extra lives, in which case they become surprisingly punishing.
There isn’t much to Rod Land — and that’s exactly its strength. It’s as sweet as candy, and just as dangerously easy to binge. Its simplicity makes me want to recommend it to people who have never touched a video game before. Games are rarely this easy to pick up and understand, even by early ’90s standards. Even Bubble Bobble, released several years earlier, featured more layers of complexity with its many power-ups.
And yet, even for seasoned, jaded players, Rod Land holds a strange appeal. Playing it feels like a reset after decades of feature creep and tutorial bloat. After spending countless hours wading through modern open-world onboarding sequences — say, in Grand Theft Auto V — few things feel as liberating as this. It’s a return to something fundamental.
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