It's been a long time since we last checked in on Hayaku! Island of Darkness, the excellent-looking NES-inspired Steam game from the Argentine developer Pizia Studios — almost three years, in fact.
And it looks like the project has made some incredible progress since then, judging by some of the developers' updates on social media.
One thing, however, that came as a bit of surprise to learn, when scanning the latest news about the game, is that the developer, Pizia Studios, has recently announced plans to work on a Game Boy tie-in for the title. The free tie-in, according to Ezequiel Nieto, the co-founder of Pizia Studios, on Twitter/X, will be a free prequel to the game and won't focus on Hayaki from the main game, but on another character named Yusuke.
"A few weeks ago, I began a mini project to complement Hayaku IoD," Nieto wrote. "It’ll be a free prequel focused on Yusuke’s story. Another interesting detail, this game is being developed for the Game Boy!"
It is being developed in the Game Boy / Game Boy Color engine ZGB, and appears to be an action platformer inspired, in part, by the Mega Man Xtreme games, which the developer has recently been playing in their spare time. So far, Nieto has shared a few images and a short 14-second clip of one of the game's levels, but it certainly looks the part from what we can see, and would have likely fooled us if you told us it was some obscure anime tie-in from the late '90s or early 2000s.
Apparently, the dev has also been working on a modified build of SameBoy for the game, too, with a custom menu to make playing on PC as comfortable as possible.
This will include "added shaders, language options, save states, and the game manual."