Cacoma Knight in Bizyland (SNES)
Cacoma Knight in Bizyland’s title and cover aren’t really doing it many favors when it comes to telling you what the game will be about. It looks like it could be a colorful platformer, or maybe a kid-friendly adventure, or even maybe a goofy role-playing game. What it actually is though is an iteration on the Qix formula, and to be fair, a game about drawing boxes to claim territory can be a bit difficult to portray in a picture and name while still sounding light and approachable.
The strange name and bright visuals on this SNES’s game box do at least tie to this puzzle game somewhat. Bizyland is a prosperous kingdom thanks to its dutiful citizenry, King Cacoma finding so little need to preside over them that he whiles away his time playing golf. However, the neighboring kingdom of Lazyland is not nearly so grand, the queen Wagamama so envious that she utilizes a magic mirror to sap the life of the neighboring kingdom. The land now dreary and dark and its people listless, Bizyland would have been all but doomed if not for the fact the mirror’s spell failed to capture anyone who was lazy. King Cacoma himself qualified, but his daughter Princess Ophelia was trapped in the mirror and its pieces scattered to complicate matters further.
With only 30 days before the princess will be trapped in the mirror world forever, the king is forced to call on the only other residents of Bizyland skipped over by the spell for being too lazy: a young man named Jack, a young lady named Jean, and the rusty robot RB93. Granting them some magic chalk that can undo the spell in small sections, King Cacoma sends them on their way after promising them their greatest wish granted should they muster the energy to actually save the realm. Mostly, this premise is portrayed at the start with a cute and somewhat comedic opener and not brought up again until the end, and while it’s not much of a plot, it is actually fun to see the unexpected wishes the three characters make should you clear the game with them. Also, while naming the king Cacoma lets the game justify the odd Cacoma Knight part of the game’s title, its true origin lies in the Japanese phrase kakomanai, meaning “must surround”, funnily enough meaning players who get the pun might actually have a hint at what kind of game they’re getting into.
That magic chalk the King grants is your means of purifying Bizyland, the game’s levels seeing you in locations where the queen’s spell has taken effect. At first you’ll see a nice colorful area, places like a village, castle, dock, a land made of candy, or even a site storing a giant robot quickly turned to a dismal decayed landscape before your eyes. However, should you manage to make a shape of any size in the play field, you’ll convert that area back to its old vibrant self. Each level tasks you with restoring a certain percentage of the screen to its former glory before it will instantly be cured of the curse, but there are some rules you must follow to complete your task. You start on the borders of the rectangular playfield, the player needing to draw outwards from it and have a pre-existing line or border serve as at least one side of the shape, and while boxes are going to be the most common shape you draw, you can move about as much as you like with the limitation being you can only draw straight lines and turn at right angles. You can surprisingly enough go backwards on your line to erase it, meaning sometimes you can second guess your work if it’s looking perilous and redraw your chalk line into something safer.
Gradually dividing up the level more and more hits that effective mark of clearly indicating how well you’re doing, the excitement building as you gain more ground. At the same time, while more drawn shapes give you more jumping off points, you also gradually have less available land to claim, this limiting your options and meaning it is more likely you’ll run into the enemies inhabiting each level. Cacoma Knight in Bizyland has a small array of fiends who try to stop your drawing, although it is often unclear what kind of threat each one poses specifically when you first encounter them. That’s because there are two main ways to lose a life in Cacoma Knight in Bizyland. One involves your character directly impacting with an enemy or attack, but others can harm you by touching the magic chalk line as you’re trying to make a shape, meaning at times you need to be careful where you’re drawing or how big an area you’re trying to claim because you’re leaving a big vulnerable trail behind you. It is rarely immediately clear how a foe will threaten you though, some enemies like ones that move across the lines you’ve drawn usually limited to needing to touch you, but others can be fairly similar but dangerous in different ways. An owl that bounces around the stage won’t harm your line, but the jet plane that behaves similarly later down the line is a threat to you and your chalk trail. Will that big umbrella dropping smaller ones harm just you? What about the magnets that spit out two smaller magnets? It’s a guessing game and yet this is a title with instant deaths, and while a death won’t clear out your work, a Game Over will even if you use a continue after. Later levels enjoy piling enemies on as well, something complicated by the more persistent foe that will appear and chase you more closely should you linger too long in any stage.
The enemies meant to threaten your work end up a rough part of Cacoma Knight in Bizyland until you’ve learned them the hard way or managed to clear their stages so quickly it doesn’t matter what they can do, although beyond offering different difficulties that can tone down or increase how many enemies there are, you can also adjust your chances of success by picking specific characters. Jack is a bit of the baseline, fast to draw and fast to move, but Jean moves even faster. RB93 though is a very strange sort, incredibly slow when he’s out drawing a line but he can zip across the already drawn lines so quickly it’s actually likely you might run into a far off enemy by mistake if you’re not careful. Jack and Jean are much more manageable to play as, the manual even billing RB93 as an additional challenge because slow drawing speed will inevitably weaken how large you can make your shapes while staying safe.
On occasion, you can box in certain enemies to defeat them, but there are a few useful tools to turn things in your favor as well, although you’ll have to find them first. As you uncover more of the original land in a level, you can sometimes uncover treasure chests as well. These are placed in specific spots and sometimes you can try and guess where they might be based on what the background image is, but often they are a nice surprise on top of your work and can provide a few boons. In some treasure chests you can find shoes that make you move more quickly, an hourglass that will make every enemy on screen temporarily disappear, and even full-on invincibility, meaning it is often a smart move to try and locate treasures rather than just grabbing every possible bit of ground you can. Some of these treasure chests will contain mirrors that hold part of Princess Ophelia though, although this doesn’t seem to be too important and won’t stop you from beating the game should you not find all of them.
Cacoma Knight in Bizyland offers two-player multiplayer as well, and in two different formats. Cooperative play lets you tackle the game’s quick but gradually quite difficult campaign together, but you can also face each other in a more competitive version of the area claiming formula as well. The versus mode sees you both trying to claim chunks of the level for yourself, the first person who can reach 50% of the playfield causing the other player to lose a life. Enemies are still present and can still harm players as well, meaning you must contend with them at the same time you try to deny the other player opportunities to steal terrain, Cacoma Knight in Bizyland having potential for some high octane battles as both players zip around trying to grab good chunks of the environment before the chance escapes them. Both multiplayer options are a fairly good addition to the experience and add a reason to potentially return to it, it perhaps easier to accept the brisk main adventure in light of greater reasons to pop the game back in another day.
THE VERDICT: Cacoma Knight in Bizyland has all the basic entertaining elements its gameplay design usually has, boxing in areas to claim more territory satisfying in a simple and effective manner. Turning grungy locations back to colorful and bright locales makes it a little more rewarding, and scattering treasure chests around to uncover even gives the occasional surprise to pep up your work. Enemies are a mixed bag though, their danger often initially unclear and later levels cram too many into one area. Multiplayer can be quite energetic, but it does feel like this iteration on Qix needed to reconsider the part its enemies play in spicing up the adventure.
And so, I give Cacoma Knight in Bizyland for Super Nintendo Entertainment System…
An OKAY rating. Cacoma Knight in Bizyland feels like it’s constantly searching for the right balance on opposing your box drawing work and it’s hard to say how often it’s successful. Play as the robot and things will be incredibly tough, but Jean can almost be too effective to the point many levels are barely a threat. As a result, some later stages fill the stage with too much constantly moving and active danger, something that will be much rougher to handle even if you’re just going through the game with Jack’s more measured abilities. Being able to double back on your line is a useful tool, especially since the enemies that ride the lines will only go across already established borders so you can poke out quickly and then pop back without having to risk plunging into a dangerous battlefield, but generally Cacoma Knight in Bizyland would be more interesting if enemies presented clear and unique threats rather than relying so much on throwing stuff around in the same space as a few other baddies with their own tricks. The balance isn’t so off that you can’t find levels to enjoy, the gameplay basics still working well even in easy stages, and multiplayer presents an effective twist since you’re competing against someone who can strategically impact your ability to claim territory in ways beyond killing you. In fact, perhaps the game should have made competing to claim more territory than a foe an element of the main adventure, perhaps as a boss battle or occasional round type. As is, it’s often not worth trying to box in a baddy since they might turn out to be immune and you put yourself at risk trying to enclose them.
While the enemies might be one of the clearer places to point at as something that can be improved, mostly Cacoma Knight in Bizyland just doesn’t feel like it does too much outside of the multiplayer modes to push past the basics of the area claiming formula. Experimenting with how enemies can impact it was a potentially promising route, but new mechanics like the hidden treasure chests feel like they could have been the start of something deeper, especially if grabbing mirror pieces was not only important, but something you could do more deliberately rather than boxing in spaces and hoping you’ll find a chest there. It still scratches the itch for a specific type of puzzle action game because even when it gets quite difficult it doesn’t bend things to the point of breaking, but this oddly named adventure is sadly more memorable for the surprise of its genre than how it executes that genre’s gameplay.