The Good Old Days

Genre: Metroidvania

Players: 1

.

Review:

The Good Old Days is a Metroidvania released in 2025 on PC and Nintendo Switch, with a plot, characters, and rough premise that is so very clearly copying 1985 film The Goonies that it threatens to skip past parody and loving homage and go straight into infringement. Players take the role of Sean, a young boy and one of the Noogies, a group of small friends in the rural town of Arostia. The game starts with Sean being informed by a loan shark that he needs to somehow come up with $30,000 within 24 hours to cover his missing dad’s debts, and to show he means business, he lets the kid know that fellow Noogies Foodie, Bruce, and Doc have all been kidnapped and hidden away somewhere in the massive series of underground caves, where Sean is told to go searching for treasure to cover the debts. Meanwhile, the group must contend with a malicious family of villains that’s clearly a stand-in for The Goonies’ Fratelli family, who is seeking to find the treasure and keep it for themselves.

If you’re a Goonies fan, you’ll likely find the mountain of allusions to that film throughout this game to be amusing. If not… well, the game’s plot still makes sense, or about as much sense as a videogame can make when the evil loan shark just told a kid he kidnapped the kids friends and put them in danger to coerce the kid to come up with $30K in a day’s time, while handing the kid a magical bomb that always replenishes after use.

The presentation in this game makes use of 2D pixel art visuals with a lot of detail, with an odd static filter overlaying everything that you unfortunately can’t seem to remove. This is backed by a genuinely excellent synthesized soundtrack, though unfortunately I can’t really find any examples to show you here.

As for the gameplay, rather than just relying on its knockoff Goonies theme to set it apart within the genre, The Good Old Days does some interesting things with its gameplay. You’re told early on that the game is meant to be replayed multiple times, and that while the goal is to get $30,000 back to the loan shark within 24 hours (played out in real-time), you’re told that yo can do so any way you like.

This means that this is a game you can technically reach the ending of within a few hours, having only explored a fraction of the game, which makes this game’s $30 price tag seem a bit steep. To its credit, the game does make heavy use of a “New Game Plus” feature that remembers the upgrades you nabbed in previous runs, though still requires you to once again rescue any of the Noogies you found in prior runs. Each of these four characters has different abilities, with Sean able to drop the aforementioned bombs, Foodie able to bash down tough obstacles, Bruce able to run fast, and so on. This in addition to helpful items you collect give the game a good sense of progression as you play through.

Whenever you lose all of your health in this game, you don’t die but instead respawn with a loss of three minutes to your in-game time remaining. You might think this would make the game relatively easy since death is less of a threat, but there are some surprisingly tricky jumps here, and similarly difficult boss battles. The game also really challenge the player to think outside the box when it comes to their abilities – for example, at one early point, it seems like you’re stuck in a small area until you realize that you can jump on your bomb before it explodes and use it as a platform.

As the game indicates, there are numerous ways to make money here, though most involve some form of exploring the game’s large map. You can collect lottery tickets and bring them to a guy who lives in a camper to cash in, you can help a homeless guy collect ingredients he needs for his “medicine”, or you can search for treasure hidden throughout the caves, with much of this behind doors emblazoned with a skull that you need to bomb. These doors can also contain keys you need to unlock access to other parts of the game’s map, food to heal health, or sometimes helpful items and equipment, but mostly these doors contain small bits of treasure to add to your total amount.

There are a healthy enough frequency of these doors that you’ll constantly be getting something, but unfortunately they so seldom contain anything significantly helpful that it stops feeling like an anticipated surprise and more like work as you drop a bomb, walk a few steps away, and wait for it to blast open the door. In addition, though there are hostile creatures as well as some enemies you need to fight, the combat here is absolutely terrible, with the bombs being a clumsy weapon, and the attacks the other Noogies have in place of the bomb not being much better.

Overall, I still really enjoyed The Good Old Days. I suppose it helps that I have a soft spot for The Goonies, but even if I didn’t, I think there’s a lot of charm present here, I think some of the puzzles this game presents are clever, and I think this game’s approach to Metroidvania design is interesting even if it isn’t always for the best. I don’t think this is a Metroidvania for everyone, especially players who don’t want to replay the game to discover more stuff after beating it. However, if you’re a fan of the Metroidvania genre looking for something a bit different, I think this game will definitely be worth trying out.

tl;dr – The Good Old Days is a Metroidvania with characters, plot, and setting all clearly derived from the 1985 film The Goonies, with players taking the role of a young boy who must rescue his friends and come up with enough money to pay off his dad’s debts within 24 hours, mostly by exploring the local underground cave system. There are some interesting ideas at work here, such as the way this game uses its New Game Plus system, and while there are problems as well (such as terrible combat), I think this game is unique enough to make it well worth playing for fans of the Metroidvania genre.

Grade: B

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