Review: Rainbow Billy: The Curse of the Leviathan

Rainbow Billy: The Curse of the Leviathan is the latest game from ManaVoid Entertainment. It offers a happy, positive and colourful adventure with its wonderful art style and enjoyable playstyle.

You play as Billy, who has lots of imagination and loves to make friends. Throughout the game, you meet new characters, such as Rodrigo and Friend-Ship, who help you along your way. Tasked with bringing colour back to the world, you’ll go on an adventure across three different worlds and meet a large array of creatures to befriend.

The great part about the creature capture aspect of the game is it resolves around talking to and helping these creatures whilst playing a bunch of different mini-games. Don’t worry, though; it’s done in such a way that it doesn’t feel like it gets old with each battle feeling so different as you’ll meet characters with different abilities that’ll change up the play style. Rather than being violent, these aspects of the gameplay are infectious as they revolve around talking and listening to these new friends. As you build up trust with them, they’ll join you on your adventure.

After each confrontation, the new creature will board your friend-ship, and you’ll be able to build up that bond with them there. You’ll talk with them some more and though listening to their needs, find presents to gift to help build up your bond together. Through this levelling up of your friends, they’ll gain new abilities to assist you in future confrontations, so it’s important to build those friendships with your new friends.

Aside from the array of creatures, you’ll be exploring different islands and new worlds. This aspect of the game is a puzzle-platformer, in which you’ll need to turn on, unlock and direct pieces to change aspects of the island to help you explore. You’ll encounter little black and white creatures called thoughts, dig for treasure and collect a lot of gold along the way. Around each island, you’ll find treasure chests full of gold and fishing mini-games as well. Your goal is to find all the thoughts, unlock new creatures and friends, plus gathering collectables called presents throughout these areas.

Rainbow Billy’s art style is one of the first things that drew me in about this game; it’s very similar to the likes of Cuphead with its 1930’s sort of character animation and mixes that with a 2.5D environment with a twist of modern cartoon inspiration.

Final Thoughts

I find a lot of enjoyment in this game and love the replayability of its levels as you unlock new abilities and upgrades. One thing that did feel a little odd was that sometimes the camera being so limited could mean you are behind an island without seeing Billy. However, it doesn’t distract from the fun I have playing it; Rainbow Billy is a charming platformer that is well worth taking the time to play.

Rainbow Billy: The Curse of the Leviathan

Release Date: 5 Oct, 2021 Platforms: Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4, Steam, Xbox One, Xbox Series X|S Genre: Adventure, Indie, Turn-Based Combat, Story Rich, Puzzler, Platformer Developer: ManaVoid Entertainment Publisher: Skybound Games I received 'Rainbow Billy: The Curse of the Leviathan' for free, to play and review thanks to the team who kindly gifted a Xbox copy of the game.