GDC 2023: Gylee Games' Ra Ra Boom Is A Kaleidoscope Of Color, And I'm All Here For It

mmorpg.com:

I’ve always gravitated toward the beat ‘em ups when I’ve been in the arcade, especially growing up. Nearby on the Air Force base I would play Gauntlet Legends, The Simpson’s, but my favorite was Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Turtles in Time. At home, these were the games my brothers and I would play on our Sega Genesis, along with Streets of Rage 2, Golden Axe, and more. 

So to see such a resurgence of the genre has been fun, as the nostalgia is being fueled hard here. And while games like Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Shredder’s Revenge are clearly trying to evoke those old beat ‘em ups of the series, Gylee Games’ upcoming Ra Ra Boom is a co-op, 2D side-scrolled that feels more like a celebration of the genre rather than a repackaging of the old.

The premise is also surprisingly prescient, especially if you’ve kept up with any tech news in recent months. It’s a simple one: humanity creates an AI to combat climate change, and that AI goes rogue when it realizes the best way to combat it is to combat those who are causing it — humans.

As such, humanity has to flee to the stars, living in space stations and ceding the Earth to the AI. At the start of Ra Ra Boom, 20 years have past, and humanity finds itself facing the ever-growing threat that the AI could jump to the space station to face down the last of Humanity to complete its task.

Ra Ra Boom’s protagonists are a group of ninja cheerleaders who, as part of their normal school day, train to fight off the AI if it ever does make it to the Space Station (spoiler alert — you can probably see where this is heading).

Speaking with the studios during this week’s Game Developers Conference in San Francisco, the team was cognizant of the things they wanted to do to improve on beat