Love Ninjas? Love Bonsai? You are going to love Bonsai Quest - a new game for the ZX Spectrum
Ninja the $hit out of people to get the sacred bonsai collection back!
Developer JuanGM has unveiled Bonsai Quest, a new arcade-adventure title for the ZX Spectrum that tasks players with safeguarding a sacred ancestral legacy through stealth, strategy, and precision. The game, released this week, casts players as a ninja navigating a perilous quest to recover six enchanted bonsai trees before invaders destroy them—a mission blending fast-paced combat, environmental puzzles, and narrative depth.
Set in a ransacked palace, Bonsai Quest follows a protagonist trained in ninjutsu, secretly honed to protect her family’s heritage. Each bonsai tree symbolizes generations of wisdom, housing the spirits of ancestors. The invaders’ destruction threatens to erase this lineage, prompting a race against time to locate scrolls, decipher codes, and unlock new areas. Gameplay emphasizes exploration and tactical decision-making, requiring players to balance combat with puzzle-solving to progress.
Credit: JuanGM/Itch
Bonsai Quest joins a growing catalog of indie titles revitalizing the ZX Spectrum’s 8-bit ecosystem. The platform, despite its technical limitations, continues to inspire developers to innovate within its constraints, appealing to retro enthusiasts and collectors. Early impressions suggest the game leverages the Spectrum’s signature color palette and chiptune audio effectively, while introducing modern design sensibilities like layered objectives and thematic storytelling. Seeing the game in the limited Spectrum palette brings back a wave of nostalgia of loading cassette games on the classic machines of the 80s.
For retro computing fans, the release demonstrates the continued vitality of development for legacy platforms, where creative constraints often inspire innovative gameplay and storytelling approaches that stand apart from mainstream gaming conventions.
You can grab the game from Juan GM's Itch page here.
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