It's flaws aren't even that bad when compared to similar "Metroidvania" style adventure games for NES, which are heralded as classics to this day. At least it lets you save your game and diesn't require extremely long passwords with several font characters that are indistinguishable from others.
It's not controllable. Faxanadu is controllable, as another Turbo example, Exile is Controllable. This.. this is just terrible. The Adams Family is a giant step forward in playability.
It depends on how you define "controllable". Obviously, it is not uncontrollable, otherwise I couldn't have
. Many games have bad enemy placement and/or collision, where you can be juggled to death from full HP with absolutely no control over it. Dracula XX does all of this. Faxanadu has some spots that are cheaper than Night Creatures and some ridiculous backtracking if you make a mistake, plus a crappy password system. Exile WP was so bad that I gave up on it, even though I'd already conquered Night Creatures for years at that point. If anything, Night Creatures was ahead of its time and artificially balances the gameplay with extra HP like too many games do today and being able to save anywhere really makes a big difference.
Just on a side note, I'm not saying the programmers were incompetent, or the basic idea is flawed. It's just executed so horribly that it's far worse than even I could have imagined.
I had the same reaction when I first rented it back in the day. After buying it cheap secondhand, I was determined to beat it for the shear challenge alone. It was even more rewarding than I expected, once I could fully appreciate just how difficult it was to figure the game out. It helps if you enjoy this style of game in the first place. I don't think that it's a good game, but it can be entertaining and it's far from unplayable, much more so than some other Turbo games. I'd still rather play a broken adventure game like this over the average sports, FPS, strategy, puzzle, digital comic, music, management, fmv, or stealth game. But I love adventure games and don't normally enjoy most of those other genres.
I can think of lots of old games by say for example Rare (Wizards and Warriors) that controlled perfectly fine.
W&W may be playable and entertaining, but it certainly doesn't control
perfectly fine.
