The year is 1993, a full year before Nintendo would release Super Metroid on the SNES and four years before Konami would release Castlevania: Symphony of the Night on the PSOne. In those games, players take control of a single character in a large world and gain abilities necessary to access different parts of that world. While there are distinct sections within each world, there are no individual levels, and both games feature shortcuts between various parts of the world.

In Radical Rescue, a Game Boy game, you explore one giant, interconnected world and find (or rescue) the other turtles. Each turtle has a specific ability necessary to access other parts of the world. You start out with Michaelangelo, who can hover with his nunchuks (of course). Eventually you find Raphael, who can tuck into his shell and scoot around small spaces. Leonardo can drill through certain blocks, and Donatello can stick to vertical surfaces. They otherwise play exactly the same, and aside from their individual weapons, look exactly the same. But that’s okay, because the game is packed with content. You can even find Heart Containers, although if your HP isn’t full when you find them, they just refill your HP instead of giving your more HP, which is kind of a drag (though it adds some strategy).

Turtles in trees? That's unpossible!

The in-game map is grid-based, confusing, and pretty worthless. It marks important locations but doesn’t tell you how to get there, so I learned (as a lad) through trial and error. Some of the enemies were pretty cool, but the boss characters were all D-list TMNT villains—Scratch, Dirtbag, Scale Tail, a random Triceraton, and of course Shredder at the end. The game isn’t terribly long once you figure out how to get through it, and there are some areas toward the end that seem to repeat (making navigation confusing) but otherwise this is a great game that every Metroidvania fan should seek out immediately.

Do you recognize Scratch, here? He was in one issue of the comics specifically so they could sell his toy. He sucked.

The game’s design was obviously inspired by the first two Metroid games, but its design is more compact and it’s easier to navigate. If Super Metroid and Symphony of the Night are end-points on the evolution of this genre (say, Homo sapiens and Homo neanderthalensis), then the original Metroid is something like Australopithecus afarensis, the sequel is Homo habilus, and Radical Rescue might be seen as something like Homo erectus. Want another paleontology-related analogy? I can do this all day. Let’s see, if Super Metroid is Tyrannosaurus, and Metroid is Dilong paradoxus…