A Metroidvania based on an arcade game should instantly ring structural bells, but Strider thankfully opts for an on-rails approach. Strider Hiryu leaps into the Meio Tower to expel its emperor with almost as little fuss as its forebear, and the narrative rarely amounts to more than occasional shady figures giving Hiryu tidbits on how to crush the empire from within. In-game markers drag the player around from area to area with frequent shortcuts cutting down extraneous travel time, and when the player actually has to backtrack, the game spins up new enemy encounters to keep the pace moving. This approach may have been just as much out of necessity as preference, as the game lacks non-combat-related abilities or puzzle potential, and what little exists for hidden items rarely scale past opening an out-of-the-way door with a late-game key.
While Coloris sits on a match-three foundation, it distinguishes itself from similar titles through a Mizuguchi-esque approach to player-guided sound evolution. With the help of jittery art-pop musician Keigo Oyamada (better known as Cornelius), the team at Skip layers inputs and playfield updates with scratchy samples, sidechained against an LFO or glazed with brittle reverb. Each square on the playfield decays into garbage when left untouched, and as they get closer to their transformation they pulse quicker and quicker. Lines scroll, dots shimmer, each block’s skin turns itself inside out, bugs crawl across, and leaves fall, each shimmering at an increasing clip until burning out with the gasp of a synth pad sting. At the game’s end, each sound effect comes together into an arrangement of blocks snapping on and off in rhythm as Oyamada presents his overarching composition. Even as the game seems to sputter on its own premise, dialing back the visual flair on the last few stages, the way it coalesces in this finale makes it clear that the campaign serves as a vehicle for sonic ideas. The player has space to contextualize the stems in their own way, pushing through until their final form is revealed.
While the overall 2D platformer scene died down in the advent of polygonal rendering in the late ’90s, Klonoa quietly inherited the mantle of Yoshi’s Island and brought its slower pace, nuanced character abilities, and high-concept level designs into the fifth generation. Much like how Yoshi can ingest enemies to create throwable eggs, Klonoa can capture and inflate enemies, although he can only hold one at a time. This restriction directly feeds into Klonoa’s puzzle design: every obstacle in the environment requires Klonoa to immediately interface with surrounding enemies to get past, unlike Yoshi’s Island, where a persistent “inventory” of eggs trailing Yoshi and a plethora of egg generators let players decouple storage from puzzle solving.
I tend to play a lot of games at once, and recently I’ve been sampling the start of many different games just to keep myself fresh and avoid getting bored with any particular game I’m playing. It also helps that I recently got ethernet streaming set up for my PS2 and have a much wider set of games available for myself. Although I have a list of titles that I’m closer to finishing and will be focusing on those for the time being, here’s some early impressions of a few under-the-radar titles that I know I’ll be returning to in the future.
A group of simulation game experts naively wandering into the arcade domain results in the rich fabric of mechanics combining the best of each genre coming out patchy. The box pitch (yell commands to your troops while you play pinball on the controller) presents the two concepts as separate, but in reality the troop manipulation rarely progresses past keeping up a tempo of pressing your troops forward and rallying them around occasional interactables. Instead, the uneasy alliance between the mighty Odama and your comparatively diminutive troops takes the forefront.
Although the painful gotcha moments and frequent shifts between setpieces may hide it on a blind playthrough, Strider’s main appeal is its movement and handling, which bridge the gap between commitment and fluidity. Main character Hiryu’s moving jump arc is a graceful parabola befitting the fixed movement of something like Castlevania, yet it interfaces with the rest of Hiryu’s kit elegantly thanks to its lack of endlag and gentle buffering. Hiryu can leap backwards to cancel his ground slide, instantly flip off of poles and ledges that he grabs, and rotate mid-jump to slash foes behind him with minimal effort. Learning the ins and outs of how all of these moves interact with each other takes effort thanks to both natural and unnatural restrictions set in place: the inability to jump out of a crouch given that the input makes Hiryu slide makes sense, while some curved ceilings being traversable forward while not backwards is less intuitive. However, learning these interactions gives the players the tools to improvise in navigating level layouts compared to the stricter routing of its ilk, all without the dynamic enemy spawns of contemporaries like Ghouls ’n Ghosts.
The initial bombast of Unwound Future immediately sets it apart from its two predecessors: a public showing of a time machine goes awry and explodes, taking the prime minister with it as Professor Layton and his soon-to-be emigrating companion Luke observe in horror. A letter from Luke dated 10 years in the future soon arrives at Layton’s office, leading him to a second, functional time machine contained in an antique clock store. Once he and Luke arrive in the future, they find that the future Professor Layton has started an organized crime ring out of London’s Chinatown and taken over the city, with his goons skulking about doling out puzzles to unsuspecting citizens. There’s a puzzle around here where you build a gun that shoots poker chips in the middle of a casino shootout. The escalation continues: Layton’s nemesis (and in a Venture Bros.-esque twist, college classmate) Don Paolo returns, a giant mobile fortress begins destroying London, Layton searches for his up-to-now unseen former lover, and so on.
Diabolical Box instantly has a better sense of scale than the first, with its initial mystery having more personal stakes for Layton and its starting train ride setpiece giving way to multiple locales compared to Curious Village’s single tight area. You’re given much more room to stretch your legs, and the second half of the game alone feels like it’s the same size as the entirety of St. Mystere. The multiple mysteries in this one also expand beyond the big endgame twist, and more care has been taken to drop breadcrumbs of intrigue throughout the adventure rather than meandering through as in Curious Village. At the same time, the larger cast of characters and tragic lover’s bond at the heart of the narrative makes the lack of attention paid to their actual characterization more noticeable. An examination of the folly of a rich family mining the earth and bringing ruin on their workers becomes didactic quickly when it’s conveyed entirely through history lessons and Layton’s personal observations, and the writers’ preoccupation with preserving the shock of the primary mystery keeps the actual humans at the core of the conflict from expressing themselves until the final ten minutes.
Games of Concentration are exactly what the name implies: brute-force memorization of a playfield of face-down cards with no optimizing heuristic. Don’t Flip The Doom Card uses this as its basis, but manages to weave in actual antagonists: “doom cards” (printed with a skull and an ominous black flame behind them) that will move across the board on each flip by exchanging itself with another card. While flipping one at any point instantly reshuffles the field and docks you a heart, you can see a skid mark between their previous and current position, and your initial flip of each turn also shows the contents of the spaces around you. With that boon in play, the actual base memorization is simple; the real challenge is finding ways to trap the doom cards by surrounding them with matched, face-up pairs.
The Professor Layton series takes the scaffolding from Japanese adventure games – screen-by-screen navigation while conversing with static characters placed within each area – to contextualize a deep collection of puzzles. Professor Layton and the Curious Village, the first entry, lays groundwork for the following entries without coming off as too raw. The opening sets the tone: Layton and his precocious sidekick Luke must locate St. Mystere, a town holding an heirloom known as the “Golden Apple” that will grant its finder the whole of the late Baron Reinhold’s estate. As they discuss directions, the player must solve a simple map “maze” contextualized by a restriction (the path chosen must only lead to a single town). As they approach the town’s entrance in the thin and stalky Laytonmobile (tall enough for Layton to wear his top hat inside), a person from across the moat surrounding the town explains that he can’t lower the drawbridge without knowing which slot his crank works in. The player must use some basic spatial reasoning to figure out which one of three holes the crank can fit in, knowing that the protrusions on the crank will be visually flipped when inserted into the slot. This is the ostensible formula: progress the narrative until the protagonists run into a conundrum and then solve a puzzle based on the circumstance.
