Grid-based puzzle games usually project the playfield as a flat surface; Tall: Infinity bucks this by wrapping it around a vertical cylinder, tying the edges of the playfield together and incorporating gravity. While the player’s avatar can freely walk up walls and fall from great heights, when rolling a block they can only surmount edges that are one row higher, and they need a column’s worth of head start to gain the “momentum” to roll up. The game’s matching focus has players pressing together sides of blocks with identical colors,¹ but the orientation of the block consistently rotates 90 degrees when pushed to an adjacent column, and flipping the block in-place isn’t possible. However, rolling the block onto a higher row actually rotates the block 180 degrees, thus making elevation changes the primary method of reorienting blocks. Since matching blocks spawns additional blocks in the matched column, it’s easy to accidentally build giant peaks without the gradual changes that enable reorientation; managing stack height to maintain reorientation opportunities naturally pushes the player away from constant matching in favor of doing light playfield management throughout a session as well.²

Techno BB is just waiting for its time to shine as a profile picture machine; the adorable half-panda half-bumblebee main character looks like a archetypal blind box figurine, with its little ears poking out over its aviator goggles. An obscure Konami title from the twilight years of the PlayStation,¹ it’s an elevated match-four puzzle title with an extremely light malware aesthetic, letting your bear buzz about the grid to eliminate tiles before they turn into skull-marked viruses. Where the backgrounds would maybe reflect this in another game, here they instead favor eclectic psychedelic and toybox patterns, all matched up to a menagerie of electronic tunes. Mix this with a lengthy, educational puzzle mode and a rare PocketStation minigame, and it’s a cute budget package for someone looking to round out an emulator library with a pick-up-and-play title.

Pass interference is usually the bane of a cornerback, but in NFL Blitz’s take on American football, where penalties don’t exist, lets defenders manhandle or completely tackle open receivers to their heart’s content. Despite the limited defensive playbook,¹ legal pass interference makes controlling a defender interesting: who and where do you cover? Obliterating a particular receiver out the gate eliminates one of three downfield options for your opponent in exchange for dedicating you to the tackle and locking you out of a character switch. Conversely, watching the quarterback’s eyes and determining where they’re planning on throwing to opens up tackles after the ball has been thrown, or even better, interceptions. Strategy here evolves based on the habits of the opposing QB,² including favorite plays and receiver formation, but fundamentally it’s a careful combination of suppressing the most dangerous routes on the field while chasing down passes; the speed and narrow field let you play defense like you’re covering one big zone. Or, if you want to shake things up, just rush the passer! Force them to throw quick and keep them in hell.

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.

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.