Donkey Kong Jr.

Mario is standing beside a cage, and this time he is the problem. Donkey Kong Jr. sends Junior up vines, across platforms, and between chains to free his father. The enemies have a talent for arriving on exactly the handhold you wanted to use.

Four compact stages turn climbing into a lively little puzzle. You need to choose a route, judge when to move, and occasionally send a piece of fruit down onto something that has been making your life difficult. It is a small game with plenty of room for a careless mistake.

Platform: NES

Retro Replay Review

Gameplay

A pair of vines can look like the safest route in the world until an enemy starts coming down one of them. Junior has to climb toward the cage above, but the quickest path is not necessarily the one you want to commit to. Much of the pleasure comes from spotting a route before the creatures close it off.

Holding two vines or chains lets Junior climb faster. Holding one lets him slide down more quickly. That gives even a simple retreat a useful little wrinkle: the grip that helped you escape upward can slow you down when you need to drop back below an enemy.

Fruit provides a particularly satisfying way to clear trouble beneath you. Reach it from above and you can knock it down onto pursuing creatures. The later stages change the arrangement of platforms and hazards, and the final rescue asks you to push keys up chains into the locks rather than merely reach the top.

The NES game runs through all four stage designs, with a tougher Game B available once the normal route feels familiar. Nintendo’s control guide covers the basics, but timing your movement around an approaching enemy takes practice. The cramped spaces leave little room for a last-second change of mind.

Donkey Kong Jr.: Junior climbs toward Mario and the cage through the opening vine stage on NES.

Graphics

Orange platforms, green vines, and dangling fruit stand out sharply against the black background of the opening stage. Junior is a small, appealing figure, and the caged Donkey Kong at the top makes the destination unmistakable without a great deal of scenery around it.

The final chain stage has a colder blue framework, with the keys, locks, and scattered creatures supplying the bright spots of color. It is spare artwork, but the combination of simple shapes and distinctive character sprites gives the rescue plenty of charm.

Donkey Kong Jr.: keys and chains fill the final rescue stage on NES.

Story

Donkey Kong has been captured, and Mario is keeping him in a cage. Junior arrives to get his father out, reversing the familiar pursuit from the first game and giving Mario a surprisingly unpleasant job.

The rescue is always visible above the action. Junior is trying to reach the cage while Mario sends more creatures into his path, turning the climb into a rather lopsided family dispute.

Getting the final keys into place finally releases Donkey Kong. Junior catches his falling father, and Mario gets a less comfortable ending to the encounter. It is a brief payoff, but a pleasing one after the last difficult climb.

Overall Experience

Donkey Kong Jr. gets a lot out of a few screens. Changing your grip, dropping a piece of fruit, or slipping into a gap between enemies makes the climbing feel more thoughtful than its simple appearance suggests.

Its limited size is also easy to notice. Once you know the four stages, the reason to return is to improve your score and handle the harder enemy patterns more cleanly. A player looking for a long succession of new locations may exhaust the novelty fairly quickly.

As a short NES arcade game, though, it remains an engaging way to spend a few attempts. There is always the hope of making one cleaner climb, and watching Mario lose control of the situation is a decent incentive to keep going.