Klonoa: Empire of Dreams

While the main Klonoa team finished up Lunatea’s Veil, Namco contracted out their frequent collaborators at Now Production to produce a sequel to Moonlight Museum for the brand-new Game Boy Advance. The result, Empire of Dreams, benefits from only minutely iterating on its predecessor, despite the addition of action-oriented auto-scrollers and bosses to break up the puzzle gameplay. The enemy roster, Moo blocks, and copious amounts of air vents all return, and the level structure retains the now-contextless moon fragments and doors that powered the winding inner loops of Moonlight Museum.¹ Thankfully, Empire of Dreams compensates for this by speeding up the entire learning curve, cognizant that most will have not played its obscure prior entry but not beholden to that game’s agonizingly slow opening. Boomies, the cornerstone of these games’ timer- and storage-driven puzzles, appear by the third world, and the early stages lean more into interlocking room designs instead of barren left-to-right affairs. If that’s still not quick enough, each world’s boss unlocks when after a certain number of stages have been beaten, so occasional stages can be skipped for those not interested in full completion.

Empire of Dreams’ most important addition to the puzzle atmosphere, then, are new arrow panels, which send a thrown object hurtling in the direction they point in. These add a new wrinkle to the storage shenanigans by preserving inflated enemies so long as they avoid contacting walls. By arranging these such that the arrows point towards each other or in a square formation, inflated enemies are kept intact permanently, endlessly cycling until picked up by the player. Additionally, by jumping and throwing an enemy downwards towards an arrow, the enemy will come right back up, enabling even more ridiculous regrab shenanigans than those featured in Moonlight Museum. The player can control the direction of many of the arrows, including changing them while riding a block flying through them. Many late-game puzzles enable access to different parts of a room through manipulation of the arrows, and given that the arrows already offer transport and storage for enemies, blocks, and Klonoa himself in different instances, it’s an extremely multiple puzzle concept that further moves this subseries away from its initial Sokoban-esque trappings.

Here and there small new interactables pop up, such as springs, or the water level control switch seen here in Vision 4-7.

The latter aspect — being able to manipulate the environment — shows up in the few other additions as well: dual-platform scales, where standing on one side lowers it while raising the other; green blocks that glue themselves to marked surfaces and ignore gravity; and entire rotating rooms that open new passageways based on orientation. The green blocks specifically fit into the aforementioned structure perfectly since they can be transported and stored along with other objects, and because they retain characteristics of the regular blocks (use as a stepping stone, blocking air vents), they fit into as many puzzle concepts as you can possibly think of while adding their own twist. In general, the game obfuscates the environment to avoid the visual idioms that lead to easy puzzle solutions, pushing the player to construct different versions to determine which will yield a solution.

It’s still not a game that truly pushes the bounds of its engine until the end, and those willing to memorize the short action jaunts between the puzzle levels will find them a trifle as well, but the single EX puzzle stage here demonstrates that Now Production understood every facet of what they were given. Here, a different version of storage is leveraged: enemies exist prior to being grabbed, of course, and if one babysits them, they can walk under low ceilings or stay useful until they are needed. In this level, the room with the final door is repeatedly returned to throughout to open up new facets of it, until a Boomie spawned in a useless position at the top can eventually walk down the altered environment towards a breakable block at the bottom. This opens up a Moo block that is used for a puzzle on its own, but remarkably, having only just introduced the idea of preserving an untouched enemy, they immediately twist it by asking the player to reshuffle the movable blocks in the stage and get the Boomie down to a separate area, where it then walks across a Moo block held up by the player. This Lemmings-esque twist on the formula shows just how far one could extrapolate puzzle ideas beyond the limited ceiling presented in Moonlight Museum.