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.
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. A time attack mode attempts to add a speed element back into the game, but it boils down merely to solving a set of puzzles back-to-back as quickly as possible.
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. Still, the game has merit on its environmental design alone, trapping the player in vicious sheets of ice and gusts of oxygen-starved wind in a rare mountaineering horror concept. The start is slow while protagonist Eric Simmons explores evacuated Tibetan monasteries at lower altitudes, but by the second half the barren slopes of Chomo Lonzo envelop the player in blinding whiteness and sullen caverns. The mountain’s name translates to “bird goddess,” and as it lashes out as you it deploys decaying avian forms that judder and blink as they pursue you. Few horror games visually capture suffocation like this.
