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.