It lacks the usual framing that comes with a point-and-click adventure, ignoring a general guiding question in favor of understated wandering and seemingly tangential puzzle design. Few rooms in the Barrows Mansion direct the player towards any method of escape, but perhaps they don’t need to; main character Jennifer Simpson can hightail it out of the mansion in minutes by starting up the car in the garage, which has its keys conveniently left nearby. If you choose not to, she’s left to meander, leafing through old books and dusting off unused furniture. The mansion’s two wings, west and east, sit parallel to one another in a neat arrangement of hallways, with the camera facing the inside and its pool courtyard. The entrance to this, an inexpliably collapsed corridor between wings with a unsteady brick wall on one side, seems to face the outside of the mansion based on the position of the camera; between this incongruity, the nondescript hallways, and the rotation of rooms between playthroughs, the mansion leaves a woozy impression, never quite locking into place even over the course of a single campaign.

The first hurdle is the ersatz-Mii, flea-market puppet custom characters that infest the world, getting stuck on each other on the course and running up to you eerily in the hub. The second, and much more more major one, is the decadent progression system. After stepping foot into the Clap Handz land-out-of-time and accessing the tournament counter, it becomes apparent that you only have access to the front nine of the starting course, reconfigured with different hole sizes, tee positions, and weather patterns over and over again until you grind out the requisite experience points to unlock more locales. Your next rank only gives you the back nine, leaving you to churn through the course several more times and fight three separate bosses to finally scrape your way into the next tier. From here on you unlock three more 18-hole courses in the campaign at a regular clip, but the drudgery of the early game lingers. Even with the hard settings turned on, which doubles the experience in exchange for a modicum of challenge, unlocking a single boss takes around 27 holes, which you have to do three times per rank, and there are six ranks to hit the credits…

A prototypical puzzle game, as in a game that makes it abundantly clear how the barest mechanics should interact in order to produce interesting levels. Owing to its origins as a BASIC type-in game,¹ the mechanics are extremely simple: moving into a block will shift it forward one tile, moving into sand will make it disappear permanently, preventing you from walking on it later, and moving into an enemy will remove it, with the win condition being removing every enemy. Every object shares key attributes: everything in the game can be walked on by the player character and almost everything has gravity apply to it (excluding sand, ladders, and some enemies). There is no concept of death, no dynamic objects, and no theme-driven levels that add or subtract mechanics. The only twist here – which is seemingly unique to this Game Boy release – is that specific levels have you control two characters at once, with the select button switching between them. The clarity and versatility of this mechanic primarily derives from it following the aforementioned rules: you can walk on the idle character, and gravity applies to them at all times, just as if they were another block in the world.

Zone of the Enders: The 2nd Runner has become one of the ball-knower’s character-action favorites, but it’s worth giving some love to its predecessor for laying the groundwork. Its release being less than six months before Devil May Cry gave it some room to stretch its legs outside of DMC’s reliance on combo depth and i-frames, while it also has a stronger hand-to-hand combat basis than its few notable mecha predecessors, such as Omega Boost or Love & Destroy. Zone of the Enders’s take on the latter is contextual but extremely polished, using a range-from-target distinction to change the capabilities of your mech, Jehuty.

This has a distinct Quintet-esque flair to it: a solemn world-restoration myth communicated through gameplay that shallowly evokes its contemporaries, although here it’s 2.5D platforming instead of hack-and-slash. Protagonist Porch Arsia’s soul is mistakenly reaped by bumbling spirit guide and dessert auteur Straynap, and the duo must retrieve the “petals” of her soul from around the purgatorial plane of Napple Town. An assemblage of both humans and surreal creatures¹ live in Napple Town day-to-day, and some of them have inadvertently imbued themselves with Porch’s petals. Merely visiting them throughout Napple Town yields little, however, as each denizen of the town simultaneously exists in another form located within one of four seasonal wildernesses outside the city gates. To restore herself, Porch must meet both the town and seasonal variations of each community member and reconcile their respective problems.

A systems-driven game with one amazing core system and a whole bunch of shitty ones in its orbit. DMA Design salvages a lot of elements in here by threading everything through the game’s driving mechanics, which perfectly straddle the line between fiddly accuracy and easy-going simplicity. The taxis clogging the streets give you that front wheel drive that’ll keep you from ending up nose-first in the bay, but if you comb through old parking lots and alleys you’ll find much sportier cars to outspeed police cruisers and pull ahead in races. In the early game, where your guns do jack squat, running someone over repeatedly becomes the standard mode of operation for each mission, turning your car into your most powerful weapon. Once it takes a certain amount of abuse, it’ll ignite, ending its life as a giant explosive that will nuke everything in the vicinity and let you get away scot-free – assuming you’re not stuck in motion or getting dragged out of the car, in which case you’ll go up in smoke as well. Every mission element that touches the driving in some way, shape, or form automatically benefits from its depth of handling and potential for carnage.

The childhood nostalgia angle hits well as a thumbnail teaser or a loopable GIF of warm glow dusk, but Boku no Natsuyasumi 2 is less concerned with portraying the ideal child’s summer and more with letting the disarming naivete of your avatar Boku open up the reality around him. “Stark” may not be the right word here, because for all of the pain and intrigue that worms its way into his surroundings, just as many of his days are filled with genuine joy or tame ennui. But for all the words that get filtered into question marks in his brain, culminating in exaggerated nods or head scratches, they additionally get transmitted directly to the player, almost as if Boku functions less as a living being and more as a probe to move around the world and worm into people’s hearts. When he actually intervenes in the plot, it’s a rarity, and almost always initiated by him alone without the explicit intention of the player.

There’s two possible games here: one where you spam main character Max’s Egress spell to restart fights while retaining all the EXP you’ve gained, and one where you tough it out and push through even as the enemies far outpace you. The difference is difficult to reconcile because going the latter route directly interferes with one of the game’s strengths: its robust cast mixing together fantasy, sci-fi, and horror influences. Laser-equipped ancient automaton Adam, alien hatchling Domingo, and final dragon survivor Bleu all show up in your party effectively useless unless you’re willing to devote time to grinding them up, which blunts the enthusiasm of bringing them in. On the other side, the game is better balanced than you’d initially think for those looking to run through with a core group of characters with quicker scaling, especially since the back quarter throws two secret units at you that will instantly swing your team back into contention with the roughest forces you’ll encounter. It helps that characters can be bought back from the dead in a game where cash flows freely from every enemy killed; on some level I would prefer if the economy was less overwhelmingly stacked in the player’s favor or if the post-battle pillage threw less amazing freebie weapons their way, but it definitely helps smooth out the curve when the difficulty dials up in the last 10 battles or so.

It’s tempting to split the game down the middle here somewhere to try to rectify its conflicts: overworld versus dungeons, story versus gameplay, even Koizumi’s Clock Town versus Aonuma’s outer villages.¹ Pithy comments like “an official edgy ROM hack” don’t do justice to the staggering depth of the developer’s notebooks, tossing out off-kilter concepts on the fly and slamming them into the game with just months until the game went gold. At the same time, this pernicious crunch led to peaks and valleys in quality, a devastating proposition when building on the bones of Ocarina of Time, which leaned heavily on holistic grandeur and originality to avoid putting the shallow gameplay front and center. The opening hours do this no justice either: the intro and disconcerting warp into the clock tower to meet the Happy Mask Salesman sell the game’s dedication to incoherent spaces and chaotic personalities early, and your jaunt around the town on the first cycle gives a glimpse into the engine behind the emotional core, but it’s seized away just as quickly when it shoos you out to tackle Woodfall, the most forgettable stretch of the entire game. The intricacies of the lives of those in Clock Town and the malignant effects that the Skull Kid has wrought on each will have to wait.

Múseca’s initial launch, with its shop-based progression system that required grinding the game’s story mode, inevitably doomed the game to obscurity. Beyond hastily released updates that unlocked all of the charts and removed the influence from the unlockable “grafica” characters on score, support for the game tapered off only a couple of years after release, leaving fans to add standard features like leaderboard widgets, hard mode, and end-of-play continue settings. It’s a shame that the botched concept mulched one of Bemani’s best concepts: think Beatmania if every button was a turntable.¹ Each button is spaced such that your pinky-to-thumb handspan will only reach two at any given time, with three on top and two on the bottom. This should theoretically make only the top middle button a shared point between the two hands, but the higher difficulty charts quickly strain that.