Infinity

According to publisher Incube8 games, Infinity began development for the Game Boy Color in 1999 before getting cancelled in 2002 as the market shifted toward newer handhelds. Almost two decades later, Incube8 launched a Kickstarter with the goal of finishing this long-lost portable game. Infinity finally releases at the end of this month, and I’ve had the chance to play through this nostalgic little adventure.

Infinity is a straightforward JRPG about a reluctant hero drawn into a battle against an encroaching evil. It’s simple compared to the sprawling epics we get today, but it’s surprisingly dense for the Game Boy Color. The tone sits somewhere between earnest and quietly sad as the party moves from town to town, chasing mythical stones and trying to understand the growing evil that they must face.

The hardware limitations give Infinity a sense of immediacy. It was easy to pick up because the whole experience is so fundamental. The story is simple, and there are never complex details that you need to remember in order to follow the events of the game. The battle system is unique. It borrows the grid-based movement of a tactical RPG, but it’s been simplified enough to move quickly. That speed matters, because random encounters will throw you into fights pretty often.

But Infinity isn’t a game about narrative twists or mechanical depth. It’s about a vibe, a kind of magic trick that’s only possible on an old handheld like the Game Boy Color. The tiny screen is a window into a world that feels slightly bigger than what you expect from this low-powered hardware.

The 8-bit graphics mostly look as simple as you’d expect, but every now and then the game pulls off something I didn’t think was possible on the Game Boy Color. Once I saw what looked like a 3D polygonal shape during a climactic scene. Other times the screen would briefly flash a full-screen still image that felt impossibly detailed for the hardware. Those graphical flourishes play into the magic trick of this game, and that’s part of what kept me coming back.

Then the game would hit me with moments that felt unexpectedly poignant for such a simple story. Late in the story, I returned to a location I’d visited before. A tragedy had struck the people who lived there, and the small changes made it painfully clear what had happened. Buildings damaged. Characters gone. The place felt hollowed out. It was a simple scene delivered through tiny sprites and a few lines of text, but it hit harder than I expected.

But Infinity is not a perfect video game. Some random encounters repeat themselves with the exact same layouts, and the combat menu isn’t always intuitive. The game’s modern sensibilities sometimes highlight how dated the original hardware is. But it’s a bit of a reach to point out even these minor annoyances.

Infinity isn’t a medium-defining masterpiece, but it knows exactly what kind of experience it wants to be. It trades in vibe, nostalgia, and feeling, and it succeeds because it doesn’t reach beyond its scope. It’s the kind of game that makes a tiny screen feel big, even for someone who now carries far more powerful devices in their pocket.

I’ve tentatively ranked Infinity as the 184th best video game out of the 293 that I’ve completed.