Little Red Hood (1989, NES) by Sachen

Current Any% Leaderboard (Speedrun.com)Some girls have all the fun.  Getting to travel through the woods, over the river, to grandmothers’ house she goes… avoiding the big bad wolf and all that good stuff.  Good ol’ fairy tales… as old as time and rhyme.  And of course, Little Red Hood, Sachen’s 1989 NES “classic” game, is based on the fairy tale “Little Red Riding Hood”.  So you know what to expect; this isn’t the first fairy tale-based game, and wasn’t the last either.  So of course… this would play exactly the OPPOSITE of the fairy tale.  You won’t be doing any of what you see in that classic story.  Instead, you kick trees, collect fruit, avoid FRANKENFUCKINGSTEIN, and collect keys.

Da fuq?

This game makes little sense, which is likely at least part of the reason Nintendo wanted nothing to do with this awful cash grab.  Casually this is one of the worst NES games, in the ilk of titles such as Wally Bear, Conan, and Rocky & Bullwinkle and Indiana Jones.  With awful graphics, terrible color mixes, stiff controls, repetitive gameplay, and droning, looping music, you’re guaranteed to rip your eyes out of their sockets and swear off video games forever…

That is, unless you try the speedrun.  Now, I’m not going to go out on a limb and say that this is a good game. It’s certainly not. As a speedrun, however, runners must deal with RNG and stiff controls in a different way, seeing is how this game is random enough that you can’t just route it out 100%.  The way it plays feels much more akin to a game like Pac-Man, or dare I even say the thought that it might be closer to The Legend of Zelda than any other fairy tale-based game I can think of.  It’s… almost fun?  It’s certainly challenging, and makes for a pretty intriguing, if not extremely shallow and short-lived, speedrun thrill of a time.

I won’t recommend Little Red Hood.  Your time is much better spent elsewhere.  However, if you want something easy to learn for the memes and the laughs, you could do worse.  In fact, I challenge those considering learning this turd to try and hang in there for the optimal run.  The RNG is heavy with this game, so if you have the patience for it, the reward isn’t the candies and sweets at Grandma’s house, but at least the victory here tastes just as good.