Super Benbo Quest is a 2018 Action Game by indie developer ThumbtackDev.
In the beginning, there was Cave Story. Indie games were good. But then skeletons take over civilization, nuking the house of blue anime girl May so that she may never recover. With extreme punching and kicking action, May must take on the skelly army until only one Benbo stands over the Earth.
The PC version of the game was excommunicated from the Steam store due to a virtual ideological falsehood incident and became banished to the inner limits of Itch.io. The game was then ported in 2023 for the Nintendo Switch, with the PC version being updated to match it.
A sequel titled Super Benbo Quest II: BenboWARS is ostensibly in the works
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Not to be confused with Bimbo Quest, The Legend of Bumbo or Team Fortress 2.
This game contains plot devices:
- Action Girl: May is the game's heroine who fights skeletons and isn't afraid of anything.
- Attack of the Killer Whatever: The game revolves around an invasion of skeletons from hell.
- Ballistic Bone: Unsurprisingly, some of the skeleton enemies can toss bones at May.
- Big Bad: Evil Giant Skeletone Head, a giant skull who seeks to take over indie games.
- Body of Bodies: The second stage's boss is a skeleton covered in skulls that act as his "hair" and fly all over the place. He only dies once all of them are destroyed, and they're particularly weak to dive kicks.
- Boss Corridor: Played for Laughs when it takes around 20 seconds to run across the empty corridor leading to Evil Giant Skeletone Head.
- Boss Subtitles: The earlier bosses are presented with a title on the screen.
- Bottomless Pits: Falling into pits instantly kills May.
- Butt-Monkey: Skellyman spends most of the game being killed over and over until he overthrows Evil Giant Skeletone Head and becomes the final boss.
- Character Title: "Benbo", presumably a nickname for the protagonist, is really what the "Quest" is called. The heroine is only referred to by her given name, "May", during the final credits sequence.
- Collision Damage: Many enemies can damage May by running onto her.
- Cut and Paste Environments: There are repeated chunks of level design in level 2.
- Dash Attack: Pressing attack while running makes May perform a dashing punch. If you run, jump and attack, it results in a Rolling Attack. While running, you can press jump and attack simultaneously do a sort of Shoryuken that also plays the dash punch animation but propels May higher than a normal jump would.
- Dem Bones: All the enemies in the game are skeletons.
- Diving Kick: One of May's more powerful abilities.
- The Dragon: Skellyman is Evil Giant Skeletone Head's messenger and right-hand skeleman.
- Easter Egg:
- There are hidden skeleton enemies who carry guitars. They drop the pieces for one of the title screen's stars.
- On the long corridor leading to Evil Giant Skeletone Head, jumping left and off the camera causes the villain to react with confusion before the Game Over screen shows up.
- Epileptic Flashing Lights: The game is so bad about flashing lights that the quality assurance people at Nintendo called ThumbtackDev in the middle of work to ask him to please tone it down a little bit in the Switch port.
- Excuse Plot: Skeletons destroyed your house. They must pay.
- Explosive Barrels: TNT crates are everywhere and work as they do in Crash Bandicoot. If May or any enemy touches them, it sets a timed explosion.
- Flame Spewer Obstacle: There are skulls that shoot flames to both the left and right. They're quite sturdy but can be knocked out of certain platforms.
- Fission Mailed: When May appears to have killed Evil Giant Skeletone Head during their first fight, he just regenerates himself and shoots her to chunky salsa with laser beams. The game flashes the Game Over screen and plays a crude credits sequence in fast foward before May respawns in hell to continue her quest."BASICALLY I GOT TO ABOUT HERE BEFORE THE JOKE RAN STALE BUT I REALIZED I HAD TO COMMIT AND FILL OUT THIS ENTIRE THING TO KEEP THE TEXT SCROLLING FOR A COUPLE MORE SECONDS"
- Half the Man He Used to Be: Evil Giant Skeletone Head dies from being sliced in half by a laser from Skellyman.
- Heroic Mime: May does not need to talk, she only needs to Benbo.
- Kick the Dog: The game opens with Evil Giant Skeletone Head destroroing May's house For the Evulz, gloating about how she will never recover.
- Killed Off for Real: After being killed over and over, Skellyman is reduced to his original form as him and May advance onto each other in slow motion. She whacks him onto the floor and he melodramatically fades into dust after a long Dying Speech.
- Levels Take Flight: Stage 3 is set on a fleet of skeleplanes.
- Mirror Boss: One of the last bosses is a big version of May styled to resemble Mega Man's 8-bit sprite. This "Mega May" uses the same attacks as the heroine.
- Mistreatment-Induced Betrayal: After being humiliated throughout the game, Skellyman betrays Evil Giant Skeletone Head and its revealed he was the former skeleton king the whole time.
- Nice Job Fixing It, Villain:
- Evil Giant Skeletone Head manages to kill May towards the end of the story... and she respawns in skeleton hell, a short walk away from his castle.
- Skellyman ends up saving May from an army of evil clones upon betraying Evil Giant Skeletone Head.
- Not-So-Harmless Villain: Skellyman, the quacking skeleton henchman you keep killing throughout the game, is actually the final boss.
- Offscreen Teleportation: Stage 4 begins with Skellyman being shown slowly walking towards May from behind when she leaves the screen. When she clears the second room, Skellyman shows up ahead of her to warn that the building will explode and then sinks into the floor.
- One-Winged Angel: During the final fight, Skellyman emerges as a giant crowned skeleton. You destroy his legs and then ride a bike towards his head, which is destroyed in a single hit.
- Platform Battle: You fight the Skelinator atop a skeleplane, so you must be careful to not get knocked off the plane by his lasers and missiles.
- Point-and-Click Map: The crude and automated world map shows a representation of May moving on the first and second levels... and then it just gives up. The next couple of levels just show her stuck on her house.
- Post-Final Boss: After destroying Skellyman's giant form, he and May run towards each other in a white void and you must punch him one last time to defeat him for good and end the game.
- Reduced to Dust: Everything is reduced to dust in this game. The skeletons, the buildings, the Benbo. E v e n t h i s t e x t . . .
- Rolling Attack: May can perform a rolling jump to damage enemies.
- Running Gag:
- Everything crumbles into dust.
- Skellyman the quacking skeleman keeps showing up and getting killed in both cutscenes and levels. Sometimes it is traps or the projectiles of other enemies that hit him without May doing anything.
- Sequel Reset: The plot of the sequel as of the available demo appears to repeat the original all over again.
- Sequential Boss: The final boss has several phases and a platforming sequence in the middle.
- Shout-Out:
- The first stage involves May entering a house, killing the occupant and leaving just like in the first stage of Kirby 64: The Crystal Shards.
- One of the last bosses is a reskin of Mega Man's 8-bit sprite. In the Switch version, it is also possible to unlock a version of May that is a reskin of Mario's 8-bit sprite, with the appropriate Goomba Stomp moveset.
- Red TNT crates work exactly like the ones featured in the Crash Bandicoot series.
- Spikes of Doom: A hazard in a few levels. Watch out for the bloodsoaked spikes that are an instakill on hit.
- Stylistic Suck:
- The game swerves between environments nonsensically cobbled together and actually competent gameplay, level design and boss fights. The developer isn't very concerned about professionalism in its marketing either, to the point he got the game banned from Steam by jokingly renaming it to "Team Fortress 3" and then to "Super Benbo Quest: Turbo Deluxe AKA @MellowOnline1 Is An Annoying Dweeb who hates fun", in a bickering with somebody who snitched him to Valve. Its Itch.io page is a parody of a Steam store page and its Nintendo store page likewise reads like a meme.
- The game's camera frequently spins, zooms and points at things like the HUD for no reason during cutscenes.
- The Game Over screen is a cacophony of visuals and noises.
- In the options screen, you can censor foul language and delete save data. The other options are fake and don't work.
- Skellyman is a crude skull-headed stick figure with a smooth walking animation.
- Surreal Humor: One stage is a Escape Sequence in a tall office building. As you climb down the floors, one skeleton locks the camera to force May to enjoy the sights (you can move off camera despite that) but a skelecopter crashes in and kills him. At the end of the level, another skeleton tries to stall for time by presenting a long slide presentation about how May is a net negative for business. You must mash through multiple paragraphs of text to get all that out of the way before the time limit ends.
- Tech-Demo Game: The game is a showcase of the many visual capabilities of the Game Maker software such as its camera rotation systems and advanced particle effects.
- Visual Pun: Evil Giant Skeletone Head stuffs May inside a plane, shouts "YOU'RE FIRED" and shoots her like a missile.
- everything is going to be alright.
