Professor Layton and the Diabolical Box

January 22, 2025 - 4 mins read

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.

Don't Flip The Doom Card

January 13, 2025 - 3 mins read

Link to the game on Newgrounds. 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.

Professor Layton and the Curious Village

January 8, 2025 - 5 mins read

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.

Polarium Advance

January 5, 2025 - 5 mins read

This strange late-era Game Boy Advance release was developed simultaneously with a DS release the year prior. Each game features tiles on a playfield that must be color-matched per row by drawing a line that flips all tiles beneath it. Although the two games seem structurally different, this Advance release is effectively an elaboration of the DS game’s static puzzle mode, with the arcade-style falling block variant discarded. Perhaps this was an acknowledgement of the shift in tactility between the consoles, as the smooth winning strokes made with a stylus on DS must be translated to non-continuous d-pad inputs on GBA.

Cursed Mountain

November 20, 2024 - 4 mins read

It’s Eurojank Resident Evil 4 for sure, but given the near immediate shift away from that particular third-person shooter paradigm in the post-Gears era, it’s sweet to see a lesser-known game attempt the style. Not that it holds a candle to its predecessor; you can’t move while shooting, but you also don’t have ammo to worry about for your paltry assortment of mystic weapons, and the vast majority of encounters throw one or two enemies at you with no confounding factors beyond that.