Preview: Boyhood’s End Is Shaping Up to Be a Masterpiece
With a compelling story, endearing characters, and breathtakingly beautiful pixel art and animations, WSS Playground , the studio behind Needy Streamer Overload , has done it again with Boyhood’s End . Since the game is in early access, the story isn’t complete, and is still half a year from completion (if things go according to schedule). Despite a rather short five hours’ worth of content available as of the time of writing, though, it’s already sucked me in. The true Symbiosis Program was this game all along.
In the far future, the AI Oversee-R Karellen rules over humanity to give people the chance to live the happiest and most fulfilling life they can lead. That doesn’t mean, however, that everyone deserves this opportunity. Every human has a score, which goes up or down depending on their family history, academic or professional performance, and actions throughout the day. Even tripping and falling on your face warrants deduction. On the flip side, higher scores give rewards like better meals, romantic prospects, and the like.
Giovanni Stylus, a student of the Galactic Gymnasium, has the lowest score of anyone in the universe. His father, Ihatov Stylus, was an illegal hacker who once cracked into R Karellen’s mainframe. Meanwhile, he and his mother are the sole survivors of a collapse six years ago, in which everyone else in Grakkis Prime’s District 1984 died. Now, Giovanni works as the hacker, Handler, to earn money for his mother’s medical fees. However, a change in Karellen’s policy for those with a negative human score forces Giovanni to take a high-paying job to raise enough money to keep his mother alive and in medical care. As for the job? Hacking into Karellen’s mainframe.
Left with no choice, Giovanni accepts and hacks his way into Karellen, which puts a target on his back. With hostile robots and facilities around every corner, Giovanni’s seconds away from death when Campanella DeMillion—a popular third-year student who recently broke a universal high score on a Mental Acuity Test, and boasts superior physical prowess and marksmanship on top of that—saves him. The two work together to escape from the Galactic Gymnasium to find like-minded outlaws. But Karellen’s eyes are all over the universe, and she’s on the warpath.
Screenshot by Siliconera
While the plot of Boyhood’s End can read like a sci-fi that deals with themes of surveillance, humanity versus machinery, and such, it’s important to note that some scenes warrant a trigger warning. WSS Playground markets it as a sci-fi “horror,” after all. I’ll describe some scenes that I believe have that potential, and so if you don’t want to read any spoilers, skip this following paragraph.
The game doesn’t shy away from showing the bullying Giovanni receives from his peers. Granted, you have to look into an optional chatroom to see more of it. A character on Planet Mollian is a drug addict, whose scenes include peer pressuring Giovanni to get high with her (though she backs down quickly) and making him insert the needle into her vein. These are just the scenes I saw with my choices, and there could be more in future updates as well. I do think if you can handle Needy Streamer Overload , you can handle this, though.
Screenshots by Siliconera
Speaking of which, since Giovanni's a hacker, I expected the gameplay to be similar to Needy Streamer Overload in that you spend all your time on Giovanni’s laptop. Most of the time, you control him on the field and solve environmental puzzles. To hack something, Giovanni needs to first find the R-Code of what he wants to crack. Sometimes, it's as easy as going up to the obstacle or item in question. Others, however, require ingenuity or another tool, which you’ll also need to hack to use. Later on, Giovanni learns to full dive, which has him entering a virtual space and solving puzzles. Most of these puzzles require pushing objects to clear paths to a key he needs to grab, with a time or turn limit to add some pressure. Despite Giovanni only having this one skill, WSS Playground provides a variety of puzzles to keep things fresh.
Considering how much I enjoy Boyhood’s End , I feel a little petty complaining about this, but the speed Giovanni moves at can mess you up when you’re not used to it. He runs surprisingly fast for a scrawny nerd. So if you’re in a rush—say, an enemy is hot on your trail, or you’re racing another hacker to solve a puzzle—it’s easy to run past the turn you need to take. It almost felt like I was playing The Witch’s House with how many times I died escaping the Galactic Gymnasium, because I kept overshooting the R-Code I needed or running into a Clean-R and letting my pursuers catch up to me. The cursor on his laptop feels equally fast when you’re using WASD, so I always have to be cautious I’m not clicking on the wrong option or R-Ticket.
If the problem is with the WASD, then the obvious solution is to use the mouse, right? Though I started playing this with a combination of mouse and keyboard, I eventually shifted to only using the keyboard. Too many times, I clicked to go to the next dialogue line, only for the conversation to end. This means I’d end up clicking on the map, which would cause Giovanni to go to that spot. Thankfully, Giovanni never died as a result, and only ever needed to go back to where he was standing. But after about ten times of this happening, it got so grating that I stopped using the mouse unless I needed more finesse to solve a puzzle.
To go back to the narrative of the game, Boyhood’s End has a cast of surprisingly endearing characters. Despite the poor first impressions Zanelli and Zero Day made on me, I found myself warming up to and wanting to learn more about them as further details about their pasts or personalities came out. Giovanni’s a fantastic protagonist, and I enjoy his interactions with characters like Campanella, Zanelli, and the members of Zero Day. Unfortunately, I can’t go into details about the latter two without spoiling things. I’m really looking forward to seeing more about them in future updates.
Screenshot by Siliconera
What immediately caught my attention was Giovanni and Campanella’s relationship. Aside from the insane opening sequence (I had to rewatch my recording the next day to make sure I didn’t hallucinate), they work well in tandem and their personalities complement each other well. I’m not the only one who saw the BL coding between them, as multiple comments from other users mention it, too. The game hammers it home with a relationship compatibility quiz that says they’re perfect for each other. I don’t want to give the impression that this is a BL game, since I want as many people as possible to play and I know it can be a turnoff. But it’s kind of hard to ignore. I choose to believe that Campanella is genuine about everything, and that his villainous countenance on the key visual is a red herring. Campanella, I trust you!
Finally, the visuals and presentation of this game are amazing. WSS Playground really stepped up the pixel animation from Needy Streamer Overload , with everything flowing like a traditional 2D anime style. I was wowed by the little details, like how Campanella’s cloak ripples around him when he moves. Even as a total noob when it comes to pixel animation, I know it wasn’t an easy feat to get it to look this smooth. On the store page for this game, WSS Playground said the game is in early access so it can release the story in a “manga-like serialized format.” Content-wise, it can feel like a manga as well, with panels of close-up shots and sequences that look like a motion comic. Like with the animations in cutscenes, the quality of these shots is phenomenal, and they use them to great effect throughout the story.
I’d like to note that I’ve not experienced any bugs when playing Boyhood’s End . At most, when playing on my laptop, some cutscenes lag a little before a character come in from out of frame. If I hadn’t played this on my PC first, I might’ve assumed this was on purpose. I’m not sure if this is an issue with my game, or with my laptop (which is getting on in age). While some reviews on Steam mention bugs or performance issues, I can’t say what they are or how annoying they are, since I didn’t come across any when playing. Until my friend told me and I caught up with the story, I didn’t even realize the game was in early access since the quality of the build was just that good. WSS Playground’s updates do note when it patches out bugs, though, so I must have been lucky.
Screenshot by Siliconera
As a general rule of thumb, I don’t play story-rich early access games if it’s not finished yet. I’m not the most diligent person when it comes to keeping up with things, and ideally, I’d rather not have to wait on a cliffhanger. In the most positive way, Boyhood’s End reinforced this for me, because I’m champing at the bit to see more of the world, characters, and plot. I’m already counting down the days until the next update and marking it down on my calendar.
Boyhood’s End is in early access, and you can play it on the Windows PC via Steam . Judging by the description on Steam, if all goes well, the game’s story should wrap up in early September 2025 (or at least, that’s when early access ends) with five chapters in total.
The post Preview: Boyhood’s End Is Shaping Up to Be a Masterpiece appeared first on Siliconera .
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