A new demo has just been released for the upcoming Game Boy Color platformer Wasp Rider: Royal Delivery — a promising title that puts players in control of a grumpy, chain-smoking ant who enjoys swinging his pickaxe and beating up pesky mushrooms.
Developed by the homebrew developer ElisaLevin and featuring music from the chiptune artist ZBW (the composer of Demon Throttle), the game originally crossed our radar earlier this week on social media, and was created using the popular tool GBStudio. However, looking at the the footage, it appears to be a step above a lot of the new Game Boy Color titles we typically see online, boasting a ton of personality across its character designs, music, and writing .
To give you an example of this, hovering over the gallery on the demo's main menu brings up a self-referential joke about game not having the budget to implement it just yet, while the game elsewhere contains oddball characters like a hippy-hating aphid farmer and a short-tempered "clown" that feel slightly more memorable than your typical NPCs.
As for the actual gameplay itself, players travel from stage two stage using an overworld map, and are equipped with a few different abilities to help them advance through each of the game's levels and accomplish each one's objective. For example, the protagonist, Ant-Guy, can spin in circles like Taz the Tasmanian Devil, break blocks, use certain kinds of flowers to propel them up into the air (similar to Donkey Kong Country's barrels) and can also climb on walls to reach higher platforms.
Right now, the demo includes the first 2 levels of the game, as well as the first boss stage, and is being referred to by its creator as a "1/2 demo", as its developers intends to release an updated demo sometime in the future, containing the entire first world.
It is playable on both emulators and original hardware and is available to download now for free from itch.io. A trailer is also available to watch below: