As you drive for the first time, you’ll notice that the 1-wood has its impact zone tightened up such that any non-perfect hit will sharply slice or hook.¹ Beginner characters used to trade out power and control for easier impact zones, whereas here the expert characters linearly improve on the starting roster without a relative debuff to impact. A small change here instantly changes the candor of every non-par-three hole that comes after it, cutting off the wiggle room that gives this series its slow, novice-friendly beginnings. World Invitational goes out of its way to raise the skill floor rather than kowtow to newcomers; it’s a lean campaign attached to a ruthless online multiplayer scene rather than a starter entry as the previous PSP titles were. Wind is only communicated through a direction and a visual of your character dropping grass cuttings until you reach the green, where the actual speed finally appears only once it’s irrelevant to the simplified physics simulation. Progression demands first place finishes rather than aggregating placement scores across multiple tournaments as in the PS2 titles. The pocket-dimension courses feature hot air balloons blocking your path, quicksand sinkholes, and holes nestled into the sides of cliffs that no mower could ever reach. As the effective finale of the series before the infrequent reboots afterwards, it goes all-in on the core of the experience without wasting time on pleasantries.

Devil Dice leverages the simplicity of die orientation to complicate what would otherwise be rote tile-matching mechanics. Six-sided dice lay across a grid, with the cutesy “Aqui” demon running around on top of them.¹ Moving off the side of an unobstructed die will rotate it into the adjacent space, exposing a number on top. When a set of contiguous dice share the same exposed number, with as many or more dice as the number on the face, they all sink into the ground, yielding points equivalent to the number multiplied by the count of dice in the set. If, while these dice are sinking, the player moves another die with the same number next to the sinking set, a chain counter increments and re-adds the points from the set, now multiplied by the counter. New dice rise from the floor in accordance with the number of dice cleared; if the player falls to the floor due to standing on a sinking die, they can use a freshly spawning die to reach the top layer once again.

The burst mechanic (surely drawing from Tetris Effect’s zone mechanic) violates the purity of the elegantly terse Lumines concept on a first impression, as it tacks on an extra meter and lets you blow up the stack on-demand. In a series that already has a friendly and frequent screen-clear block type, slapping this on top is a bit overkill, and survival play, which had a low ceiling from the series beginning, gets utterly trivialized in the process.¹ But Lumines is richest in score play, and the burst mechanic throws a major wrench in the game’s brutal measure-to-measure combo system. The burst “minigame” identifies a current square formation and lets you build it up over multiple timeline sweeps, creating a monolith that tosses blocks of the opposing color off-screen. Optimally setting up “seed” squares before initiating the burst requires foresight and tempo, especially when lining it up with a x12 or x16 combo from consecutive multi-square timeline sweeps, although the burst can also salvage a combo that’s about to expire in pinch. Doing the latter is risky, however, as using burst when the meter is between 50% and 99% doesn’t scale the effect (gives you three measures to build compared to a 100% burst’s six) and thus wastes any additional meter you built up over the halfway mark. Tying all of this together, activating burst also freezes the level progression, making any of the squares you clear during the burst period freebies and incentivizing the player to pop burst as often as possible. This makes it your biggest cash cow for score purposes, with the half-meter version gaining more relevance if the player has the skill to juice the monolith with very little time. Doing this circles back to seeding the burst correctly and so on, making the mechanic a potential friend and your biggest stressor at the same time.

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.