The thing about Glover is it’s esoteric and singular. No other game plays like Glover. It’s not that it plays especially well. That’s not why it still counts some 27 years after the game’s release. It’s that Glover is the only game that does what it’s doing. What it’s doing is platforming as a disembodied glove who navigates balls through levels. If it’s been upheld as an unconventional curio of the N64 library, the reason is largely down to its visual imagination.

The way Glover starts is a lot of fun. A wizard has a magic accident and all his crystals are scattered across the realm of The Crystal Kingdom. Stranger yet, his two gloves have become disembodied and sentient. On the one hand, you have Glover, who is good and gonna try and get those crystals back, having quickly transformed them into beach balls as they launched into the air and off to their new environments. On the other hand, you have the malevolent Cross-Stitch, a ne’er-do-well glove who will try to stop our hero from returning the kingdom to order.

The game establishes all this in a fun, short cutscene, and then lets the gloves loose to play. The visual imagination extends to the varied and weird enemies that dot the levels, the abstract level and puzzle design, and to the quirky animation qualities of Glover himself. It could come down to one simple thing, this hand that attaches to a ball, and launches it around levels, but Glover does a few things. He crawls cutely on the ground, dragging himself by his fingers. He does eccentric little cartwheels. He can guide the ball by hand, or spin it by running atop the ball, and can bounce and throw it like a basketball. This makes for a fun and fairly game specific move set for the puzzle-platformer.

Where the game suffers is in playing it. This new edition is not too new. It’s an upscaled model of the same game. Still looks like an 1998 N64 game blown up wide. Has more visual and mechanical errors than even that original game had, and some audio issues, too.

That the presentation is so flatly ported is too bad. Glover is novel enough that a real effort to transpose it would be notable. There really aren’t many games like it — you could look at Billy Hatcher and the Giant Egg (2003) and Katamari Damacy (2004) as it’s spiritual successors, games where characters run balls or eggs around, to different effects, but the planned sequel to Glover never came out, and it was something of a fun one-off, forgotten in the dust of more same-ish and plain platformers of its time.

Now? In 2025? Play it if the nostalgia moves you. Otherwise? What’s the point? It’s a novel retro game that deserves a little more work than it’s gotten but this result does little more than emulate what was there, to varying degrees of success. This isn’t the best version, which remains the N64 original and PC port of that, with the PS1 release also being preferable but a little different. Yet, say you do have a tinge of nostalgia — this glove and ball run through classically themed levels is probably the only game that’ll satisfy that itch. So, play it if you gotta.

5/10

Reviewed on Xbox