What Micro Mages is
Micro Mages is a 2D platformer built for the original 8-bit NES, and it comes to Steam with the ROM included in the installation folder. You play a wizard climbing the Demon Fortress, a place full of treasure and nasty creatures. The core moves are shooting and wall-jumping, and you use them to scale the fortress towers and take on the bosses waiting at the top. The game has 26 spooky levels split across normal and hard modes, plus dangerous traps, monsters, and ancient secrets to find. A password function lets you continue your game the classic NES way.
Playing together
One to four players can play at the same time. Your group can pick either approach: cooperate to get through the dangerous levels, or turn on each other and fight over the high score. The trap design works both ways, since the same hazards that threaten a cooperative run become tools when you want to ruin someone else's day.
Dying does not put you out of the session. If you go down while at least one other player is still alive, you become a ghost and can freeze enemies to help the living. Crates and treasure chests may hold a Fairy or Feather that brings you back, so a dead player has a real path back into the action instead of waiting on the sidelines.
Before you start
Expect a challenge. The game carries the difficult and old-school tags for a reason: tight platforming, wall-jumping through hazards, and bosses that punish sloppy play. It is family friendly and cute in its pixel art, but the levels still ask for patience.
The ROM of Micro Mages: Second Quest, a level hack of the original, sits in the game's installation folder, reachable through the Steam library's local files. Remote Play Together is supported, so friends can join in over that feature alongside the local multiplayer the game is built around.