Gargoyle's Quest

What if that annoying winged demon who made your life miserable in Ghosts 'n Goblins became the main hero? It's on exactly this cheeky question that Gargoyle's Quest from 1990 rests — a spin-off in which you don't play as the knight Arthur but as one of his enemies. You take on a winged demon named Firebrand, and suddenly you're looking at the whole world from the other side.

Capcom didn't stop at a simple role reversal, though. Gargoyle's Quest is a surprisingly deep game that blends several genres at once. Most of the time you move through side-scrolling platformer stretches where Firebrand uses his most characteristic ability — he can hover in the air for a limited time and cling to walls, which gives movement an entirely different logic than ordinary jumping. Between the action passages, however, you find yourself on a top-down overworld reminiscent of an RPG, where you meet characters, enter towns, and advance the story.

And it's precisely the RPG layer that lifts the game above an ordinary spin-off. Firebrand grows over the course of the adventure: the duration of his flight lengthens, his health increases, his attacks grow stronger. This progression gives the gameplay structure and a reason to explore — on the Game Boy in 1990 it was an unusually ambitious fusion of action and character building that made the title a cult affair among connoisseurs.

The game's tone is dark and distinctive, far from the cheerful colors of other handheld titles, and Firebrand as an antihero lends the whole expedition a character of its own. It's no wonder that this character and his world earned sequels across platforms — Capcom followed up the success with the NES prequel Gargoyle's Quest II and later the culminating SNES entry Demon's Crest, which took the concept to a visually rich form.

Gargoyle's Quest thus remains one of those titles that define why it's worth digging through the Game Boy catalog even beyond the biggest names. It's a small but confident work that proves even a side character can yield a surprisingly rich adventure.

Why play it: A cult Ghosts 'n Goblins spin-off that combines platforming, RPG progression, and a dark atmosphere — and kicked off a prized trilogy capped by Demon's Crest.