Full Stack of Flapjacks: Rhythm Games

November 21, 2025 - 5 mins read

One of the “issues” with many of the arcade rhythm games I play is that they have such a breadth of content and high difficulty curve that I rarely reach the point where I’m comfortable talking about them in the context of a full review. However, since I published my guide to rhythm game critique last week, I wanted to also provide some quick thoughts on some rhythm games I’m not quite ready to dedicate an entire review to.

Clock Tower

November 2, 2025 - 4 mins read

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.

Everybody's Golf

October 30, 2025 - 7 mins read

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.

Catrap

October 15, 2025 - 4 mins read

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.

Zone of the Enders

October 2, 2025 - 7 mins read

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.

Napple Tale: Arsia in Daydream

September 21, 2025 - 7 mins read

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.

Grand Theft Auto III

September 15, 2025 - 6 mins read

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.

Boku no Natsuyasumi 2: Umi no Bouken-hen

August 31, 2025 - 7 mins read

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.

Shining Force

August 12, 2025 - 4 mins read

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.

The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask

August 7, 2025 - 23 mins read

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.