Skunny: Back to the Forest is another famous adventure starring the fabulous and adorable little animated squirrel, Skunny Hardnut. With obvious inspiration from other platform gaming animated animal heroes such as Jazz Jackrabbit and Sonic the Hedgehog, Skunny Hardnut is a vivid, colorful side scrolling platformer that is surprisingly quick and smooth and features some very good platform play. It was created and published in the early nineties by Copysoft…upon the orders of Skunny himself.
Skunny grew up listening to his father’s interesting tales of his own adventures.
Skunny knew he wanted to be as interesting as his father someday, and aspired to be the star of a video game that would be played on people’s personal computers. It worked for Jazz and Sonic. Unfortunately, none of the software programmers that Skunny contacted thought that a squirrel was a suitable hero character for an action arcade-style game. After numerous failed attempts, Skunny commissioned his own team of software experts…the people of Copysoft…to build his own game around him. However, Skunny ended up physically inside the video game when attempts to scan his likeness into the game failed. After several failed efforts resulted in black and white images and broken bits of Skunny, Skunny simply entered the game himself.
The story of the game that Skunny
will physically star in involves the notorious King Toad. While Skunny and his girlfriend Rosie are vacationing in the Bahamas, King Toad captures all of the gray squirrel friends of Skunny’s and uses them as the bait for one giant Skunny trap. Skunny will have to save his friends from the forest by negotiating each level, finding the super health nut that will destroy the environment and place him in the next level, and eventually he will have to battle the King Toad. Within each level, Skunny must destroy each of the King Toad’s toad henchmen. He can do this by eating the health nut and gaining the ability to fly. He also becomes immune to the touch of the poisonous toads. Without the health nut, any contact with the toad henchmen will rob Skunny of one of his lives.
Skunny: Back to the Forest is a fun and colorful little arcade-style of platform game. Gamers that enjoy the Jazz Jackrabbit series will likely enjoy Back to the Forest, as well as other Skunny adventures. Its nice, clean-cut story and lack of graphic violence…aided by the colorful cartoon characters…makes Skunny a great game for kids that adults will also enjoy.
