Retrospectively speaking, Ace Combat’s¹ rough-hewn edges might appeal to those turned off by how quickly the series streamlined starting with its immediate sequel. Starting Ace Combat’s hard mode plops the player into an unmaneuverable tin can that explodes upon contact with a single missile, and the plane selection only incrementally improves its quality from there. Broadly speaking, the most useful planes are split between durable hunks of junk and fragile ships that pivot on a dime, leaving the player to decide between the least bad choice for a given objective. Both of these give the simplistic dogfights and bombing runs a distinct flavor. The former makes downhill approaches a necessity to build up enough speed when avoiding surface-to-air missiles surrounding a drop zone, while the latter turns stray gunfire into a legitimate danger. The decisions here (along with a bevy of stealth planes and other more unorthodox choices) make experimentation with each mission much more useful compared to later titles, which drown the player in extremely useful all-rounders.

The fundamental genius of the Kururin trilogy derives from its unique, bare-bones approach to modulating outcomes over time. Consider racing games: part of their appeal is how the timing of an action alters the outcome of each action that comes after it. Taking a turn changes not only the car’s current speed and direction but the speed at which it arrives at the next turn as well. This propagates to the requisite braking power needed for the turn, the best line to take through the curve, and the torque and power the engine is putting out; each variation adds nuance to later actions. Even when the system is abstractly solvable, the variables are so granular and dynamics so nonlinear that reproducing the solution is never trivial. The Kururin series does this without the same density or non-linearity by instead constantly turning Kururin’s long, stick-like ship while punishing contact with any obstacles. The player tracks little other the rotation of the ship and the location of moving obstacles, yet small variations in timing change the phase of the ship’s rotation for future movement, restricting viable movement through future corridors. While this lacks the analog granularity of car control, Kururin’s ticky-tacky movement and three discrete speed settings make up for it by clamping the player’s precision, asking them to alternate between the separate speed modes rather than key in a specific analog value. This reconstitutes the subtle variations of each run that racing games exhibit, elevating Kururin to their level in the confines of a handheld d-pad.

Although the package is unassuming and generic, Skydiving Extreme is actually a hidden fourth Bust-a-Groove entry, using a similar QTE combat concept without the rhythm component.¹ The latter absence fundamentally alters the flow of each match: without synchronized measures tying the players together, the race is on to mash the button commands as quickly as possible. Dance battles from Bust-a-Groove transform here into skydiving choreography, with each team of four leaping from a plane and forming what are effectively body sculptures of progressive complexity. Presumably these formations also increase drag, as incorrectly executing them will put the divers in free fall, with the team that reaches the break altitude first losing. Over the course of a clear, the player earns the right to take on more and more complex maneuvers, performing in thunderstorms and other dangerous locations.

Tall: Infinity’s ascetic insistence on clipped chains and limited board manipulation cultivated a severity that perhaps muted its appeal, so Techno Soleil went back to the drawing board and overhauled its core components¹ into something radically different. Instead of awkward stick figures slowly constructing the Tower of Babel, looming over the player on the title screen, Tall Twins Tower pivots to adorable animal-suited characters swimming in the ocean or stacking under a singing moon. The shift is more than mere aesthetic: the two primary protagonists each have an absolutely disgusting level of board control that completely nullifies the austerity of Tall: Infinity’s mechanics. Cat Debinyachi can slide an entire row below them clockwise or counter-clockwise around the cylinder playfield, while rabbit Rabbikyu can lift and shift individual blocks without rotating them in the process.² Without needing to roll blocks onto row ledges to change their orientation, any block slightly off from making a match can now be seamlessly “fixed” to make it work, vastly decreasing the difficulty of finding and preserving chains.

In Deus Ex, hour after hour of slices of the world perfectly align into a living playground of roving militants and hapless civilians. Rarely does a game ever make its missions feel properly explorable while keeping it taut and linear at the same time, and yet Deus Ex routinely weaves both together. For every underground lair with traps laid out in sequence, an open oasis follows – see the suffocating catacombs that give way to the Champs-Élysées avenue of Paris, with a bakery to pilfer contraband drugs from, a hostel with full bar access, and an arms dealer’s loaded apartment, all off the beaten path from your main objective. Military bases and science labs exhibit believable layouts, and locker rooms, rows of cubicles, and break rooms feature just as prominently in the dungeon crawling as warehouses with guards patrolling or tightly wound mazes of laser tripwires and turrets. The authenticity and legibility of these areas comes first, and yet more often than not the designers still manage to weave in appropriate challenges without violating each location’s fidelity in the process.

First perceptions may peg this game as a Jenga variant with some explosive addendums, but Boom Blox is more of a generic rigid-body physics sandbox with support for a diverse range of play-styles. This isn’t robust on accident, as the campaign explicitly pushes the engine’s capabilities to mold it around its scraps of narrative. Each level takes place in a flat, open zone with various stacked block structures, but the specifics beyond that can vary wildly, including the camera, which may be static, movable in an arc centered on the arena, or 360° rotatable from the playfield’s center. Players may lob baseballs, shoot guns, or manipulate the blocks depending on the course’s objectives. The Jenga comparisons apply to some levels, but in others destruction is an explicit condition, either in totality or in a controlled fashion. No matter what you choose, it’s rare that the game won’t throw you a curveball in one form or another.

The kineticism of chiseling a sculpture out of stone infuses itself in any purely mechanical discussion; there’s no analysis of Picross 3D that can ignore it. In the original Picross games on Game Boy, the conceit was similar: the player chiseled images into a stone tablet. There, beyond the lack of a touch screen,¹ the flat surface made the action less like a sweeping change and more like a small marking, like scraping one’s name into a wall. Here, the action transforms nondescript stone into a living, breathing object, releasing it from its marble cage and revealing its true form. Of course, the actual similarities to sculpture fall apart here: art doesn’t merely hide inside stone waiting to be systematically unveiled. But the tapping still translates to carving with force, presenting physicality many other DS games only wish they could have.

Racing games often get boiled down to how turns are taken and how other cars behave, ignoring jargon-heavy descriptions of handling dynamics and transmission characteristics. Dotstream actualizes this: your “car” is merely a Tron-esque line that paints the lane behind it the same color. When you proceed straight on the horizontal track, you approach max speed, and when you arc into a different lane, you lose speed. Each line takes up the totality of its lane, so switching into an occupied lane skips your car to the next available, and course leaders can bump those trailing by hijacking their lane. Although you come out the gate exceedingly slow compared to your opponents, a slipstream mechanic evens things out. Shadowing a line by following in an adjacent lane juices a meter parallel to your speed; when this meter exceeds the other, it pulls top speed up to match. This interplay – clawing for lane space while hewing close to the front of the pack – defines Dotstream and its course design.

Atlus adapts the grisly world of surgery as a timer juggling exercise, with the player managing a main time limit, the drain on their patient’s vitals, and the interval until a new hazard spawns. Kyriaki, one of the game’s fabricated “GUILT” viruses, best exemplifies this. It appears by creating an incision in the patient’s tissue, which bleeds and thus increases the patient’s vital drain, and it travels under the tissue surface making more incisions until extracted. Locating one permanently requires detecting it with an ultrasound and then cutting it out of the tissue with the scalpel, after which it will make yet another incision, leaving two net additional cuts to deal with. To kill it, you target it with a laser for a period, with the caveat that leaving the laser in one place for too long will burn through the tissue and cause a hemorrhage. When multiple of these appear at once, you’re put in the uncomfortable circumstance of switching your attention between actively adversarial viruses and the injuries both you and they incur. This aligns with the game’s spatial aspect: your tools utilize stylus strokes, so the player can optionally bide their time fixing injuries while waiting for multiple Kyriaki to line up for extraction in a single strike. Attempting this without consideration of the patient’s vitals often results in a quick death, however, especially in scenarios where killing one on its own leads to two more spawning and overwhelming the organ with incisions. While this sounds like a traditional combat game, the implementation is a stranger blend: small skill-based actions, almost reminiscent of the exaggerated tasks of the Cooking Mama games, required dynamically based on the behavior of the virus.

The Layton series put itself in an unenviable position with a follow-up to the grandiose Unwound Future, which pushed the world-rending consequences of the series to their breaking point. Last Specter attempts to roll back to a more sustainable franchise template, both by starting a prequel trilogy and by restraining the scope to a small town with minimal personal entanglements for Layton, but in the process the writers lose the self-aware artifice that punctuated the previous entries. The original trilogy each features Layton traversing and overcoming a state of unreality;¹ Last Specter expects both Layton and the player to take the game at face value. Misthallery has its charm, with canals threaded throughout, powered by a reservoir looming over the town, but what you see is what you get. The lack of mass conspiratorial orchestration leaves the new trilogy’s villain looking rather impotent compared to their predecessors, who possessed transformative power over the events Layton witnessed. When Last Specter’s narrative reveals the supposed titular specter – a giant figure that has destroyed swathes of the town – as a hitherto unseen squishy Loch Ness monster only to immediately hedge on its culpability, it inadvertently demonstrates just how lousy this game’s hand of cards is. Instead of bluffing until a flush is laid out at the end, they frantically stack bets on weaker reveals steadily throughout. Perhaps it improves the pace, but the final impact suffers.