They're built on familiar adventure-story standbys and played for nervous giggles, but Mignola draws them drenched in shadow, as if they're dredged up from primal anxieties, and wrenches the plots out of joint whenever they start running too smoothly.
Suddenly, the door opens, and in sweeps the exotic figure of a towering woman — a peacock, the details on her gown indicate — who leads the boy out into the jungle, where the familiar adventures of the orphaned man-cub Mowgli take place.
Meanwhile, GamesTM (8/10), ShackNews (9/10) and Gamespot (8/10) all concede that the title is a sort of grab bag of familiar action adventure components, but that it puts them together very nicely.
The plot takes the familiar Japanese arcade adventure format, as your chunky pixellated hero tries to stop the dark king Onyx from conquering a 2D world reluctantly forced into the 3D age.
By this point Big Red Software was already familiar with platform adventure games.
"Familiar characters, cliffhanging adventures and predictability," she said.
But there's still something unnervingly familiar about the adventures of Katniss Everdeen as penned by Suzanne Collins.
Set on a series of tropical islands, Sun and Moon offer familiar Pokémon-catching adventures, but add new mini-games and competitive multiplayer modes.
That game is long gone, a million miles away, but its familiar yet unique adventures, the ingredients of big-time ball everywhere, are what we fans might try to keep hold of for a little longer now.
