Stop That Roach! (Game Boy) Playthrough - NintendoComplete
145A playthrough of Koei's 1994 puzzle game for the Nintendo Game Boy, Stop That Roach!
Stop That Roach! is an offbeat puzzler that seems like an odd choice from a company better known for their historical war simulations. However, the game hails from an earlier time when Koei was quite a bit more experimental in their game design. It's actually a modernized remake of their 1983 PC88 game Hoi Hoi.
I remember seeing the reviews and advertisements when the game first came out and the game immediately caught my fancy. Unfortunately, though it was one of those games that I kept an eye out for, I never once found a copy of it at a store. I didn't get to play it until a few years later once Game Boy emulation had become a thing, but I did eventually manage to grab a copy online several years later.
Stop That Roach! is a puzzle game that has you, as Ken or Lily (two of the homliest children I've seen), working to stop a horde of roaches from getting into their food.
To clear each of the 100 rooms, you have to kill or trap every roach within a set number of moves. You can jump near the roaches to herd them toward traps, kill them with bug spray, or smash them with slippers and brooms. Using the slipper or the broom sends out a shockwave that will scare nearby roaches like the jump does, and most of the puzzles force you to carefully anticipate chain reactions in order to move forward. Every stage can be cleared in a handful of moves, but that doesn't make it easy. Not by a long shot. Stop That Roach! tends to be absolutely infuriating in its difficulty in the later stages, but if you have the time and patience for it, there is a lot of meaty puzzling here to sink your teeth into. Finishing this game made me feel quite accomplished.
As weird as the concept is, the roaches give the game an unexpected shot of charm. There are a lot of fun animated closeups to spruce up the action - when your turn is over you'll get to see them pumping their fists as they prepare to charge, and it's pretty funny to see them recoil as they gasp for breath when you spray the insecticide. Ken and Lily have little animations like this too, but they're terrifying. Remember the CG baby in Twilight? Yeah, like that.
The Pac-Man-like cutscenes that you see every ten stages are the highlight, though, and they get stranger the further you get into the game.
Overall, I loved Stop That Roach! It's an amazingly hard game, but I got a lot of satisfaction out of solving some of the tougher puzzles. If you aren't opposed to exercising the grey matter and you want to try something that's weird and obscure, this is great.
(For maximum enjoyment, hit mute and put on something mellow in the background. Stop That Roach!'s music *will* test the limits of your sanity after awhile.)
*Recorded using Retroarch's DMG shader to mimic the look of the original hardware.
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No cheats were used during the recording of this video.
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