everygame

[everygame]

JaJaMaru No Daibouken (Jaelco, 1986)

Developed/Published by: Jaelco Released: 22/08/1986 Completed: 13/04/2025 Completion: Completed all 20 different levels (it loops.)

Well, more fool me. When I wrote about Ninja Jajamaru-kun, the game that precedes this in the series, I wrote that it “[didn’t do] enough to make me put up with ININ’s bullshit to get the sequels.”

Unfortunately, having a bunch of Nintendo gold coins to use up before they expired and seeing the Ninja JaJaMaru: Retro Collection going for $2.99 made me go “well, it’s basically free, why not.”

I’ll tell you why not: because… do ININ even like retro games? Are they just an avenue to prey on a group of willing suckers–i.e. retro game collectors? Because not only is the Ninja JaJaMaru: Retro Collection bare bones, it doesn’t even work correctly.

Now, feel free to consider this anecdotal because I’ve only tested this on my Nintendo Switch Lite–and no youtubers or the like have really covered this release in depth (I imagine it’s niche enough to not have done that well.) But if you try and play JaJaMaru no Daibouken with the included CRT shader on it creates so much slowdown that you actually can’t play the game. It completely tanks.

It runs fine if you don’t have the CRT shader on, but, frankly, I’m a CRT boy. I don’t care if it’s even that good a shader or filter (notable exception: the excretable one on the Astro City Mini) just as long as it does something to muddy up the graphics. The games were literally designed to be seen on a tiny crappy telly via a noisy RF cable, so it just feels wrong to me to see them all crispy and HD.

So that was $2.99 down the fucking drain–but at least I haven’t dropped money on the Turrican Anthology or something [“yet”–Ed.] But let it not be said I’m one for giving up. Thanks to my trusty Trimui Brick I could quickly and easily get set up to play this through with an acceptable CRT filter, and I suppose that’s the way I’ll play the rest of this collection (god knows I’m not picking up a Switch 2 to try and see if it improves the performance of a CRT shader…)

But, uh, let’s actually talk about JaJaMaru no Daibouken, eh?

It’s rubbish.

Will I ever play it again? No!

Final Thought: Oh, alright, I should probably say more than that. So… I suppose the interesting thing is that JaJaMaru no Daibouken came out just under a year after Super Mario Bros. (Ninja JaJaMaru-kun was released after Super Mario Bros. too, actually) and it’s the first obvious Super Mario Bros. clone I’ve played chronologically.  Sure, it’s possible Pac-Land for Famicom was rushed out after matter of weeks in development (though unlikely) but that was based on a pre-existing design, and Wonder Boy doesn’t feel that much like Super Mario Bros. when we’re being completely honest.

But JaJaMaru no Daibouken feels like exactly what you get if you ask someone to take the art and engine from Ninja JaJaMaru-kun and turn it into Super Mario Bros.: it’s got side-scrolling levels, blocks JaJaMaru has to hit with his head to get coins and power-ups out of, and… well, I mean, that’s enough. It’s not exactly the Great Giana Sisters, but the “hit blocks with your head” thing is enough. Case closed!

I’ve previously mentioned that the original Super Mario Bros. doesn’t actually feel that good to play–we’ve just all misremembered that, because the later ones do–so I can’t really beat up on JaJaMaru no Daibouken for not controlling that well (floaty jumps and that.) What I can beat it up for is just being so bloody half-arsed. Levels look like they just threw down blocks in any old combination, and although the game features 20 levels, but half of those are boss battles that you don’t even have to complete–if you die, you just go to the next level and don’t even lose a life. And the game doesn’t have an ending or anything, it just loops. Which actually leads to the ridiculous situation that you can reach the “final” boss, fail to rescue Princess Sakura, and then… just go to the second loop. Deeply uninspiring.

JaJaMaru no Daibouken keeps a lot of the flavour of the (by this point) established JaJaMaru franchise, though, which doesn’t as much feel like something they did to differentiate as much as it’s just what they had lying around. The power-ups act like they do in the previous game and JaJaMaru’s uncontrollable frog pal Gamapakkun shows up too, albeit rarely. Though weirdly, the most interesting mechanic from JaJaMaru-kun, that you have to jump on enemies heads so you can shoot them, doesn’t show up here! (Maybe they thought it was getting too close to Giana Sisters-esque “let’s get sued” territory.) There’s an annoying learning curve in that you’ll never know which enemies kill you on touch and which don’t until, well, you’ve been killed by them, and weirdly one enemy that shows up right at the end, the Tanuki, can’t be killed but you can jump on their head to stun them. So… half of a mechanic from JaJaMaru-kun, for one enemy, just to confuse us, as a treat.

It’s all very inconsistent, but because of the terrible level design, you quickly work out that you’re just supposed to run through the levels ignoring all the enemies as much as possible. While it’s true this is optimum for Super Mario Bros. too, the level design there ensures you engage with enemies in interesting ways. Here your engagement is generally things like “oh an enemy spawned directly in front of me and killed me with a projectile before I could react.” or… actually it’s usually that one.

JaJaMaru no Daibouken is over very quickly, so it’s a very minor waste of life. But it is a waste, I won’t lie.

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[everygame]

Developed/Published by: Infocom Released: 22/08/1986 Completed: 18/04/2025 Completion: Completed it. 304/304 points (though points are random and I believe you get them all just in the process of beating the game.)

Phworr, eh lads? Etc.

Right, that’s me got all the 90’s video game magazine parlance out of the way [“you forgot ‘or something’ and to do a made-up Ed’s note”–made-up Ed.] so I can put my “pretending to be a serious games historian” hat on for the first Infocom game I’ve played since Trinity–surprisingly, all the way back in 2023. If you’ve been following along, you’ll be aware I’ve been picking and choosing Infocom games to play through, leaning towards the work of Steven Meretzky, and I’ve been looking forward to playing this for a while, his “return” to a more normal sort of adventure game after the big swing (and commercial miss) of A Mind Forever Voyaging.

Based on a joke title Meretzky posted on a whiteboard featuring upcoming releases for Infocom, Leather Goddesses of Phobos is a strange release, I think. Infocom had always made games for adults, but never “adult” games, and there hadn’t really been any commercial “adult” games for years at this point. Softporn Adventure came out in 1981, and unless you’re Portuguese and have fond memories of Paradise Cafe for ZX Spectrum that was about your lot. So it seems like quite a gamble for Infocom to release something that appears so risque–but then Leather Goddesses of Phobos isn’t really an adult game at all. In fact, it’s barely smutty at its most extreme, and Meretzky, wanting to drum up a bit of controversy after the failure of an anti-Reaganite art game, decided “sex sells” and Infocom as a group went for it: digging through Meretzky’s papers, he sent a sheet of possible game ideas to the other imps (this may have been the standard procedure at Infocom?) for his next game, and Leather Goddesses of Phobos won out, where its sexual content was expressed as “very soft-core; see Barbarella as an example.” (it doesn’t even go that far, to my eyes.)

(The sheet is quite illuminating in general, a kind of ideation that I recognise as a game developer. We have another attempt, I think, to court a bit of controversy with “The Interactive Bible”, an interesting if not-yet-fully-baked design idea “Blazing Parsers” and then something that’s optimistically trying to make making a game quicker, “The Viable Idea.” Personally, I’m sad we never saw an Infocom spaghetti western.)

Unlike some other Infocom releases, I don’t really have any personal history with Leather Goddesses of Phobos outside of memories of the (very) mildly titillating screenshots of its sequel, Gas Pump Girls Meet the Pulsating Inconvenience from Planet X! In fact, the main thing I have to say is that I only realised this wasn’t called “Leather Goddess of Phobos” after playing it for a bit, which won’t make me cry “Mandela Effect” as much as “Goddesses is such an inelegant word, it’s bizarre it isn’t just Leather Goddess. My brain was correct, reality wasn’t.”

 But anyway, what is it actually like to play Leather Goddess(es) of Phobos?

I’ve been a bit up and down on the Infocom games I’ve played–some might say unnecessarily hard on them, judging them by the coddled standards of 2025. But Leather Goddesses of Phobos gets off to a good start. Unlike Trinity, where you essentially never know what you’re actually trying to do overall, Leather Goddesses of Phobos more or less immediately has a character hand you a laundry list of items to collect, and then you go “oh, I guess I just have to collect these, then.”

As good as that is, it’s also a little… underwhelming. Having picked and chosen, I’m aware that I’ve not seen everything that Infocom has to offer, but I’m still surprised that I haven’t played an Infocom game since Deadline (their third game) that gave me any sense of anything except a static world. Leather Goddesses of Phobos gives you a Floyd-like companion (Trent, or Tiffany) but they barely seem to exist, and even when you meet characters in the world they feel so… un-interactive. Maybe, at best, they take part in a little vignette.

I suppose with Leather Goddesses of Phobos I’m really realising–and perhaps chafing against–the limitations of the text adventure at least in the mid-1980s. In some respects, you want a text adventure to have the feeling of a book; limitless, enveloping imagination. But in other respects, you want to play it like a game. You want to be reacted to. It’s probably, why, to be honest, characters have been so sparse in these games–because when you try and interact with a character, and they don’t do anything, or it feels wrong, the illusion of being on an adventure is broken. You’re not reading a book, you’re on a dark ride and suddenly the lights slam on and you’re aware you’re looking at a mannequin, not the king of Mars.

Somehow, the fact that characters in Deadline might like… walk into another room just abated that, and I’m not asking for characters to roam across the planet here, but maybe if they piped up a bit more. Felt a bit more worth talking to. The issue with making a “funny” game is that so much of comedy is character work, and here, really, the only character is the parser.

But I’m being a bit harsh, because Leather Goddesses of Phobos is otherwise an extremely solid classic rooms and items, bread and butter text adventure. The best I’ve played since Meretsky’s own Planetfall, and arguably the best I’ve played full stop. It’s understandable, accessible, and I never had to use an Invisiclue to the point where it just told me what to do–well, except in one particular case.

That one I’m just going to spoil, actually. One of the things that makes Leather Goddesses of Phobos work so well is how well integrated the feelies are. Sure, I don’t have the box to hand, but there’s a comic which includes a couple of direct hints for some puzzles, a map which is unbelievably necessary and helpful, and a scratch and sniff card, which I’m sure nearly 40 years later is completely useless even if you opened a brand new box, but which is a really cute and silly B movie-adjacent idea that’s perfectly fitting. One of the things it does is prompt you to “smell” things in the game to work out what they are (which it thankfully tells you in text–scratch and sniff cards have always barely worked). Early in the game (for me–the game is fairly open ended) you sniff and discover some chocolate, which, of course, you’ll hang on to. Later, for reasons, your mind will be transferred into a gorilla. But you’re not strong enough to break out of the cage. I assume you can see where this is going: you need to eat the chocolate to get strong enough to break out of the cage.

You know, that famous thing about gorillas. That chocolate makes them strong.

This is, obviously, nonsense. The only animal-related fact I know about chocolate is that it kills dogs and I certainly wasn’t hanging onto it in the game expecting I’d use it to kill a poodle or something [“you said ‘or something’ after all”–90s Ed.] Considering that banana is one of the most recognisable smells you could possibly use on a scratch-and-sniff card, I had to assume that Meretsky simply thought that giving you a banana would be too obvious a solution so went with the impossible to work out chocolate, but I couldn’t find anything in his notes to reflect that. According to the ever reliable Digital Antiquarian, Meretsky tested the scratch and sniff scents on the other imps to select the most recognisable scents to then use in the game, and I do think it adds insult to injury that one of those chosen scents actually was banana! But it’s used elsewhere!!!

I even found a playtester who complained about this exact puzzle:

“It is reasonable to not eat the chocolate and even suspect the sugar rush, but why oh why would you put the chocolate in the cage?”

I suppose he’s more complaining that this game features more than one puzzle which requires hindsight, and to be honest, they should have fixed those too. But in general, Leather Goddess of Phobos is logical and fair, while still managing to make puzzles funny and clever–the best of The Hitchiker’s Guide To The Galaxy without the worst of it. There’s a puzzle about kissing a frog that will immediately put you in mind of the famous babel fish (and which made me laugh out loud) and a puzzle involving a mysterious machine and wordplay that is so perfect and silly that it’s maybe one of my favourite things in an adventure game ever–possibly worth the price of admission alone.

The game does still undercut itself though–for seemingly no reason. There are definitely ways to manufacture yourself a no-win, dead man-walking situation, for example, all of which I miraculously managed to dodge due to the order I did things in, and I definitely had a few puzzles where by all rights I was just lucky to not have to resort to clues. One object on your list you need to specifically look somewhere you might not look to find, and then you need to be really specific with the parser to do what you need to do to get it. Another requires a vignette that you need to be in time for (though that one I immediately sussed what was up–the “dead end” was just so suspicious to me. But I reached it almost at the end of the game–if I’d got there early, I could have had to replay nearly the entire game.)

The game’s maze–which people find famously annoying–is a perfect example of how the game undercuts itself. You have the map in hand. You have the required clue. If you’re patient, it’s actually really satisfying to navigate it, and I did so… and then the torch I was using burned out, and I had to do the whole thing again much more efficiently. Close to hundreds of turns. It was so unnecessary! I was having fun!!! Why punish me for not being perfect!!!

These moments, however, are far rarer than you’d expect. I noted above that the game is fairly open ended, and I’m not sure if there’s a “preferred” way to work through the game, but as I said above in my playthrough I never entered a vignette where I didn’t have something to hand I needed (though it’s possible, I’m sure) and if I got stuck somewhere there was always somewhere else to go for me to solve something else. I never put this down annoyed–well, apart from the fucking maze. Well, not the fucking maze–the fucking torch (I honestly did think the maze was clever.)

I think the thing about Leather Goddesses of Phobos is… it’s probably as good as one of these things is going to get without a much more modern design philosophy. You know what you need to do and every time you sit down and play it you get a little closer to doing it–and it’s charming while you do it. But it’s never sexy. I did play it on the “LEWD” setting and took every opportunity for a bonk, because I’m still thirteen at heart, but my dander remained unfrothed; it doesn’t even reach the heights of Alter Ego! I guess I’ll see how I get on with [checks to-play list] Leisure Suit Larry??? Eugh!

Will I ever play it again? You know, it’s possible. It’s not likely, but it’s possible. And I will play Gas Pump Girls Meet the Pulsating Inconvenience from Planet X!, which I don’t believe anyone likes. Because why not.

Final Thought: In some respects, Leather Goddesses of Phobos suffers for not being something special like A Mind Forever Voyaging, but it also sort of is, as the last true success Infocom would release before the company began an unstoppable slide into oblivion, and for that alone it should be celebrated. At the very least, if you like text adventures, though, you know how to play them, and you can live with the idea you might have to reload a save on occasion, this is a solid couple of tevenings. Oh sorry, I mistyped… tevenings. There must be a mysterious machine around here somewhere for that…

Enjoyed this post? It was originally published at exp. Magazine, a user-supported website. Support us by subscribing at Patreon, buying us a coffee via Ko-fi, or just subscribing to our newsletter.

[everygame]

Transistor

Developed/Published by: Supergiant Games Released: 20/05/2014 Completed: 10/04/2025 Completion: Finished it.

It’s been a couple of years since I went through Bastion(!) so I thought I’d boot up another Supergiant game, and decided to just move forward chronologically when I checked and saw Transistor was pretty short–I just keep putting off anything that seems like it’s going to take ages to complete these days. Plus it’s always nice to see how a studio evolves.

Not knowing anything about it, I assumed–what with the isometric graphics, and the lady with the big sword–that Transistor was “more Bastion” in terms of being an action title with light RPG elements, but it’s actually something much weirder–an awkward meld between Bastion-style real-time mechanics with a turn-based battle system that’s similar to something X-COM, or more specifically like Valkyria Chronicles, with free movement and action-point system.

I'm so sincerely not a fan when promo screenshots hide all the UI–in Transistor's case, they go as far as completely hiding the entire battle system (which looks like this.)

There’s also a bit of the deckbuilder to it. While the game doesn’t have a huge or ever-changing range of abilities, each time you level up you select new abilities and each is able to work as an action on its own, an upgrade to another action, or a passive ability, leading to a pretty wild amount of combinations which are meant to emphasise your chosen playstyle. So you can double and triple down on your favourite ability by adding upgrades and passives that support it, or you can try and make a “hand” of abilities that work in conjunction–maybe you want to tank damage; maybe you want to be a glass cannon, maybe you want to spawn helpers or play stealth. It’s all some amount of possible.

It sounds really good, and interesting, but I’m sad to say it doesn’t work, because the combination of real-time and turn-based combat is never comfortable. It’s not so much like eating a chocolate and peanut butter cup as trying to eat spoonfuls of peanut butter while chocolate pours from a faucet that you can’t turn off. The game seems to be balanced around using your turns in a tactical manner, but you have to wait for your action points to regenerate in real time. You are defenceless during that period (unless you upgrade one of your abilities to be used during recovery) so you’re stuck running around being attacked until you can get back into a turn.

This isn’t fun at all! The enemies are fast and the action frantic, so any time you’re not in a turn you feel like you’re barely keeping your head above water, soaking up damage. I’m sure there are mitigations, and it’s entirely possible if you’ve played this you created a hand of abilities that made the experience smooth, but Transistor really fails at explaining anything about how to play it.

It’s probably part of the game’s storytelling–it starts in media res and slowly reveals what’s going on–but it feels like there’s no help in getting comfortable with the mechanics. There’s a “backdoor” area that appears periodically where you can take part in “tests” that throw you in at the deep end so you can learn by trial and error what different abilities do and how to combine them, but I’ve finished this and I’ll say that I’m actively unsure if I ever played this game correctly. I ended with a build focused on long turns to allow me to debuff and do massive melee damage, which sounds really rewarding, but I still spent most of the time taking damage and running away, even with one attack set for use during recovery. If that’s intentional, I just don’t get it.

The upgrade system really probably does have too many options and is fussy to interact with. 

It really feels like one of those designs that someone came up with because it sounded good, and then you get to this point in development where you have it all built but you can’t find a solution to a problem like “what do people actually do while waiting for turns to recover” because the core of the design, ultimately, just doesn’t meld.  It seems likely they found people being able to use all their abilities in recovery (for example) made the turns either unimportant or overpowered and then couldn’t solve it so just powered ahead because it roughly works. I’ve watched a few playthroughs of Transistor and everyone else seems to have played it similarly to me–different abilities, but same tactics. It doesn’t really look any more satisfying a play experience than the one I had, which is a bit of a shame for a game that puts such effort into having an insanely modifiable range of abilities. You just never feel like you’re excelling, just surviving.

To speak positively, Transistor’s arms-length narrative did grow on me. I think largely down to the performance of Logan Cunningham as The Transistor; he sells the game’s noir-like setting while expressing deep pathos; he’s talking to someone he loves, and you can always hear it in his voice. You could argue it overpowers everything else in the game; the enemies have no character and the main antagonists are barely there. The central characters are the only ones you’ll care about–thankfully, they’re sensitive to that, and when the game ends, at least that feels satisfying.

Transistor really isn’t a game I could recommend, though, even as short as it is. It just doesn’t come together.

Will I ever play it again? I’m generally glad when a game includes a new game plus, and while I could unlock more abilities and so on, this is one of those stories that feels like such a nice closed loop, why ruin it by playing it again? Never mind that I didn’t actually really like how it played that much…

Final Thought: A thought you might have about Transistor is “why isn’t it just totally turn-based?” but it’s obvious once you’ve played it for a while that the overhaul required to make enemies work and balance it would be almost an entirely new game. Sometimes you just go down a path and there’s no going back.

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[everygame]

The Internet Is Dead. Plant Flowers In The Corpse.

The Internet is dead.

This is not a eulogy, but an acknowledgement. An acknowledgement that what I’ve come to accept the internet to be is dead. An acceptance that in the name of ease, I’ve absorbed myself into a corporatised space that is at this point not simply eating itself but eating me, us and everything that we create.

And I think: fuck it.

In 2023, when I started publishing exp. again in print, I was, I think, trying to close my eyes to it. I liked–and I still like, I love–the purity of print, the focus. I still want to make things and put them into the world. But I also just love writing, and sharing it. For a long time, I’ve relied on existing sites for my work–be that big platforms or outlets, but of course what happens is they pivot, they get sold, they get erased. And it can feel like we’re always searching for a settled high ground–Bluesky feels great now, but is it just a little rocky outcroppings in poisoned sea, bound to erode or be subsumed?

At the end of 2024 I published Every Game I’ve Finished 14>24, which I think works as a nice culmination of my last decade of writing. But as I’m not going to stop, it seems necessary in our new dead internet to do something that I’ve been meaning to do for ages, which is plant and cultivate my own space properly and invite you to visit it. Not just hope that you’ll see something I’ve posted as you scroll, but offer something that you can actually choose to engage with. Where my writing finally stays, where you can properly search and explore it, where I can expand beyond what I’ve been doing if I like.

It's here: https://www.expzine.com.

I think there’s a danger of nostalgia here, some sort of limiting call back to the idea that you’d, like, log on the internet and type “https://www.expzine.com” in every morning after you’ve read the three or four webcomics you keep up on (wow, Superosity is still going!) but I think that’s why I’ve become enamoured with the mindset of POSSE–Publish On (your) Site, Share Everywhere–and using it to its fullest. So I’m going to be posting here, then spreading this to every part of the stupid corporatised internet I can be fucking bothered with. Let decay feed growth.

To support that, I have (sorry) started a new Patreon with refreshed tiers to accompany my currently existing Ko-fi that has been supporting the continuation of my writing and publication of my zines and books. Unfortunately, Ko-fi’s tools aren’t robust enough, so this seems to be the simplest way to offer new articles to supporters on this site first, so if you aren’t already a supporter, please check it out. 

(Something worth emphasising I’ve continued to set the lowest tier at just $1 a month–so it’s as little as $12 to support the only* video game criticism website on the internet)

*as far as I'm concerned

If you are already a Ko-fi supporter: you don’t have to do anything. You can continue to support me on Ko-fi and I’ll be sharing articles–in full–over there a week early as usual. But if you’d like to move over to Patreon, I’ll be sending you a free month of the tier your current donation is equivalent to, so you don’t feel like if you want to switch over you’re being double charged or anything.

If you don’t want to support, that’s fine! You could just sign up for the newsletter, which is going to remain free and collate the posts of the week plus some extra waffle. Probably, I haven’t really planned them yet.

If you just want to continue reading on tumblr: That's also fine! I'm just going to continue posting articles here too. POSSE, baby!

And if you don’t want to do any of that, I’m not entirely sure why you’ve read this far. But the point stands: if you don’t like our dead internet, grow your own.

[everygame]

Batman (ZX Spectrum)

Developed/Published by: Jon Ritman, Bernie Drummond / Ocean Software Released: 05/1986 Completed: 01/04/2025 Completion: Finished it. God help me I finished it.

It all seemed so simple.

Jon Ritman and Bernie Drummond’s “Head Over Heels” is a big video game (or should I say, computer game) in the personal history of Mathew; bought because it was so lauded in the likes of Amstrad Action, it really did blow me away once I played it: a true adventure featuring two protagonists with different abilities that you have to use together. It seemed like a work of genius to me.

So when I was looking over 1986’s releases, I noticed the pair’s previous isometric action adventure, Batman, and thought it might make sense to play. See if the magic of Head Over Heels was there from the beginning, and set the table for a replay of Head Over Heels at some point in the future.

I’d consider Batman a bit of a joke in the non-UK gaming community, probably because anyone who is looking up Batman video games is going to discover that the first Batman game is a ZX Spectrum release that features Batman wandering around an isometric, bizarrely decorated Batcave looking for parts of the “Batcraft” where the enemies look like melted dogs and basically touching anything kills you. It’s just so weird, lol!!!

What’s generally forgotten in the discussion is that in the mid-1980s, no one gave a fuck about Batman. It had been nearly twenty years since the TV show and Wikipedia notes that even Batman comics circulation had reached an “all time low” by 1985. His fortunes would turn around rapidly–The Dark Knight Returns would actually start being published before Ritman and Drummond’s Batman would come out–but considering the era, from Ocean’s perspective it will have been an opportunistic gamble: grab a cheap license on death’s door and try and squeeze some more juice out of it. And they did give it to one of their best developers, who’d already given them a lot of success with the Match Day franchise. Clearly it wouldn’t matter too much that he could barely remember who Batman was…

Anyway–I’m just going to cut to the chase here and say that this took me about six months to finish, and as a result I’ve lost most of the specific game history I’d dug up about it and all that remains is a lot of vague “I read somewhere that Ritman said…”. So don’t quote me on anything but my memory is that Ritman has been quoted as saying that he wanted to best Knight Lore, and then Drummond came in and started drawing like a cyclops head with flippers and he was like “alright!”

Knowing this, I should probably have played Knight Lore first, but getting into Rare’s entire back catalogue would be a whole other thing, so I can just say that even with a prior understanding of the isometric action adventure, Batman is a brutal experience.

First things first: it’s really hard to parse visually on the original ZX Spectrum. The environments are surprisingly detailed, but because it’s all in monochrome, it’s really quite hard to discern what everything is, and no way to tell what’s going to kill you when you touch it. I had hopes that the Amstrad CPC version with its wider range of colours might fix that, but there’s no consistency from room to room so it sort of just looks insane.

If you want to play this in 2025 with normal human eyes, there’s a fantastic remake by Retrospec (that’s, er, fifteen years old itself), or you can go back and play “Watman” a DOS remake from 2000 (so closer to the release of the original than now.) However if you’re really determined to play this (which I don’t recommend) what I recommend is to play the MSX2 remake. It’s pretty much what you’d imagine the ZX Spectrum original to be if it had full color–right down to the performance. 

And, of course, then you get the ability to quicksave and load, because without that I’d have never been able to finish this in a million years.

The version I played looked like this. Significantly easier to parse.

It’s not simply that Batman is full of things that kill you. It’s that the game is designed to force you to play perfectly from the first screen. Enemies seem to have a truly random movement routine (hope you love shuffling around waiting for them to select a direction away from you) but that’s not an issue as much as that there’s no leeway in the collision detection, and in fact the game is designed around that, generally requiring that if you want to make a jump you actually have to position Batman so he’s got about one pixel left on the platform he’s “standing on” so you can reach the next. Hilariously, the manual makes excuses for this:

“To make certain jumps it is necessary to hang by the ‘merest thread’ on the edge of the Carbon Re-inforced Batcloak - you may need practice to perfect this feature!”

(This isn’t even the funniest excuse in the manual, which also notes “The Joker and the Riddler do not appear ‘in person’ in the game, as Batman is all too familiar with their image. The henchmen they have selected are unfamiliar to Batman and this further complicates his task.”)

So yes, the game is exacting. And with 150 rooms to explore, it’s also bloody confusing. It’s actually not as non-linear as you might think–a lot of directions you go don’t really head anywhere–but once you get deeper into the game your head will spin, and every game over feels like being kicked full in the groin when you realise how difficult it’s going to be to get back to where you were (although the game features a save system of sorts based on when you pick up particular collectibles, it’s unforgiving at best.)

And on top of all that, the puzzles are intense. I will have to go back to Knight Lore to see just how complicated things are there, but it’s a bit like when you go back and look at things like Wizardry or The Bard’s Tale. You’d expect that these genre originators would be simple, but somehow they’re significantly more complicated and off-putting.

Here, you can sense Ritman almost understanding how to provide an on-ramp for players as the game is designed that you first collect Batman’s gear, slowly growing his abilities as you go (you can’t even jump at first) in a smaller section of the map that’s particularly linear. But one of the very first puzzles will kill you multiple times because it requires that you walk the wrong way on an invisible conveyor belt and then do a pixel perfect jump????

It soon gets absolutely absurd. I’m not going to lie. After beating my head against this game for months off and on–struggling to understand the maps I was able to find (isometric maps on paper are confusing!)--I eventually just started watching and carefully following someone’s playthrough on YouTube (a playthrough that, notably, they die a bunch of times on.)

I usually love using contemporary maps and walkthroughs. But you try and work this from Amstrad Action Issue 9 out (it spreads over two more pages!)

This revealed to me that certain screens had insanely unintuitive solutions that I just don’t think I’d ever have worked out. The screen where you have to catch a wizard’s hat and then catch an enemy on top of said hat otherwise they’ll block your path. The screen where you have to manipulate several teapots to reveal a completely hidden piece of the batcraft. Or my favouite, the screen where you have to time dropping a spring on the top of an enemy’s head so you can ride them and jump off at the right time to get to the exit???

I have no idea how anyone did any of this in the first place. Playing Batman has to be ones of the most demoralising gaming experience I’ve ever had, genuinely feeling like being trapped in a carnival funhouse until I can solve a rubik's cube while a car alarm goes off (don’t play this without making Batman’s footsteps silent…)

I’m aware, though, that a lot of people don’t feel this way, considering it’s been remade so many times! Which actually makes me extremely worried that Head Over Heels isn’t the masterpiece that I remember it being.

Well, guess I’ll find out soon enough!

Will I ever play it again? I played it more than anyone ever should.

Final Thought: Certain things just aren’t worth beating, and I’ve definitely given up on things before, but my fealty to my memory of Head Over Heels really was overpowering to the point where I thought I had to, that I would simply find something here. And to be fair, by the end of my playthrough, I was dying far less, and I could probably get through a significant chunk of the game now legitimately if I really wanted to.

I really, really don’t want to.

Please don’t make me.

Every Game I’ve Finished 14>24 is OUT NOW! You can pick it up in paperback, kindle, or epub/pdf. You can also support Every Game I’ve Finished on ko-fi! You can pick up digital copies of exp., a zine featuring all-exclusive writing at my shop, or join as a supporter at just $1 a month and get articles like this a week early.

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Mach Rider (NES)

Developed/Published by: Nintendo Released: 01/05/1984 Completed: 30/03/2025 Completion: Finished 10 courses–there’s no ending.

Another early NES title that seems to go largely unremarked and unremembered, Mach Rider surprises me because since I began working through all the games I own/have access to in (vague) chronological order, this this is actually the earliest raster-scrolling racer I’ve played. I mean, of course in my history I’ve played Pole Position and the like, but I guess I just assumed I’d have had easy access to something more iconic in the genre before this. You can argue that Super Hang-On counts, because the original version of Hang-On was out before this, but it feels like a bit of a cheat. And indeed, I’m now quite baffled that Pole Position wasn’t included in Namco Museum for Switch. 

And now I’m remembering the Pole Position TV show and its banging theme song. Can you believe that it only ran for 13 episodes and it’s completely seared into my mind? I really wished they’d make toys of the cars when I was a wean. Ah well.

(You’re here for these digressions, right?)

To get on topic, Mach Rider is a strange one because Nintendo passed up releasing F1 Race, a much straighter racing game, in the West, and released this as the first racer on the system. But it’s not, exactly, a racing game. In Mach Rider, you play the titular hero in the year 2112 [“Rush Klaxon!”--Canadiana Ed.] who is racing across a devastated future landscape looking for survivors. Your superbike is equipped with four gears and forward guns, and as you race you have to avoid, shoot or bump off course enemy “quadrunners” while also avoiding ice, oil slicks and other debris in the road.

Most unusually, the game has a strangely split design in its story mode (“Fighting Course”) where for some reason on the first level you are racing with energy counting down, and you can’t game over (unless the energy runs out) but the quicker you can finish the level the more lives you earn for the rest of the game, where you can game over. I’m not entirely sure why this is, but it might have something to do with the major secret of Mach Rider.

You see, the first time you play Mach Rider–and probably for a bunch more goes, maybe all the goes you ever have of Mach Rider–you’ll notice something. It’s hard as balls. Actually–it’s unfair as… is there a kind of ball that’s unfair? Lottery balls? It’s as unfair as lottery balls (you can use that one if you like.)

I love a rear-view mirror in a video game (who doesn’t remember the one in Rad Mobile, with the Sonic toy dangling away from it) but here you have to really pay attention as you immediately die if you collide with anything that you aren’t at least matching speed with. What this means is that you really need to be taking the courses at full speed because otherwise cars just shoot up behind you and crash into before you can do anything. But if you are going at full speed, when you go around corners you can’t see and react to, say, rocks or barrels in your way, so you just crash into those before you can do anything. It could be said you’re in between a rock and a hard… car.

This feels… rubbish. You can get into a groove of, say, racing along in third gear, going up to four when someone is on your tail, and then slower on corners, but it can’t protect you from completely unseen hazards particularly well, and you will, probably, put the game down in frustration. Because it’s just sort of annoying.

But I mentioned Mach Rider has a secret: a power-up system that I doubt many know about because it features such a (sigh) Tower of Druaga-esque series of requirements:

To become invincible to on-course obstacles:

Shoot and destroy exactly 3 blue drums at the side of the course and then bump enough enemies off course to their death that you end with over 180 bullets (“blocking” enemies gains bullets.)

Infinite ammo and auto-fire:

Destroy exactly 12 black drums on a level that has them.

All shots are one-hit-kill: 

Destroy exactly 6 bomber balls on a level that has them.

Now, I honestly thought this might be made up because the requirements seemed so stupidly hard. But on the first level, you have the ability to practice without fear of game over, so if you just start by slowly shooting three drums and then practice on the course you can eventually unlock the invincibility and then… Mach Rider becomes quite playable!

Now, you do lose these power ups if you die–but you might not have that many lives to begin with, and the invincibility makes the game close to trivial as you can blast through all the levels in fourth gear, only really having to worry about bomber balls, which can still kill you out of nowhere (the main reason you probably want to go out of your way to get autofire–but it’s much harder to get that consistently or consistently early.) 

It’s like the team at Nintendo–or rather HAL, who put this together–couldn’t really work out a way to make the game not frustrating without making it too easy, so they bodged in a system where the pro-strat for Mach Rider is to get really good at unlocking the first power-up on the forgiving first level and then hang onto it for dear life.

I suppose it doesn’t really matter–the game doesn’t have an ending (you do ten levels, then there are ten more, then it just loops) so the game is ultimately only a score attack. But I don’t know if I’ve ever played a game like this before–one where it’s passable if you know one weird trick and absolutely rubbish if you don’t!

Will I ever play it again? I gave myself a cheeky save state after the first ten levels but I don’t see much reason to go back.

Final Thought: Mach Rider is ostensibly named after a toy Nintendo put out in 1972–a hot rod racing toy that they licensed from Hasbro–but I don’t see any meaningful connection between them. It’s possible Nintendo used the name simply because they had the trademark? 

More likely though I think they used it because the game feels so inspired by the always popular Kamen Rider–the Mach Rider even sort of looks like a Kamen Rider, and included a setting inspired by Mad Max (which also featured biker gangs.) One could even posit that “Mach” and “Max” sound a bit alike.

(But that last one doesn’t really work because Mach Rider is transliterated as “Maha Rider” in Japanese.)

Every Game I’ve Finished 14>24 is OUT NOW! You can pick it up in paperback, kindle, or epub/pdf. You can also support Every Game I’ve Finished on ko-fi! You can pick up digital copies of exp., a zine featuring all-exclusive writing at my shop, or join as a supporter at just $1 a month and get articles like this a week early.

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Blue Prince

Developed/Published by: Dogubomb / Raw Fury Released: 10/04/2025 Completed: 22/04/2025 Completion: Entered room 46.

I have great respect for the craft and effort put into Blue Prince.

But I don’t think Blue Prince respects me.

…

Before I dig into that, let’s actually explain what Blue Prince is. At a high level, it’s a puzzle adventure deck-building rogue-like-like (phew)  in that it takes design cues from things like Myst or the 7th Guest. So you wander a mysterious location–in this case, a stately home–solving logic puzzles and pulling levers in the hope they do something you can at least vaguely understand, all in an attempt to get to the “antechamber” room you can see at the other end of the map.  

However, in this mysterious location, every time you enter a new room, you place that room on the map from a “hand” of locations drawn from an (unseen, but slightly manipulatable) deck. Rooms feature up to four exits (though may be dead ends) and can contain puzzles, objects or actively negative effects, and can influence other rooms. So, for example, you can draft a utility closet and turn on the power for the garage, whether or not you’ve drafted it already–so you might prioritise drafting it if you haven’t. 

You place these rooms, moving through them until you either are stuck placing only dead ends or run out of steps. Each day you’ve got a limited amount of rooms you can move through (including backtracking) and once that ends, your day is immediately over and you must restart with everything reset–other than any permanent upgrades you’ve managed to unlock or bonuses for the next day, which include new areas, upgraded rooms, and things like daily allowances of the game’s currency (gems and coins) or even extra steps.

If this sounds like a great piece of design–it is! Blue Prince has taken a format–the rogue-like-like deckbuilder–which isn’t always a slam dunk, and tied it logically to 3D exploration in a way that feels both surprising and exciting. The simple puzzle of putting the home together–trying to use dead ends in a way that doesn’t cut you off from the antechamber, placing rooms you haven’t seen before, hoping for the rooms you know you need–is “one more go” par excellence: you want to place another room, and each room leads to another. And if you fail? Dead ends, out of steps? Well, if you start again you’ll already get to place more rooms. So start again!

But here’s where respect comes in. Where, for me, the cracks begin to show. Because Blue Prince isn’t a “fair” Rogue-like-like. You can quibble the concept of fairness in games in the lineage of Rogue–after all, the original game is doubtlessly impossible to complete on the majority of runs–so let me state first that I believe that Rogue derivatives should aspire to every run being winnable. Doesn’t mean that the player wouldn’t have to play perfectly but it should be possible.

Why does this matter? I’m certain that a lot of people already disagree with me on this as a starting position–and if they’re already primed to defend Blue Prince, note that the game actually has an achievement for finishing it on a single run from a clean save, which I’ll get to. It matters because I’ve got an addictive personality. It matters because Blue Prince, more than any other game I’ve played, made me wonder why we love Rogue derivatives but hate loot boxes.

Yes, ok, loot boxes cost money. But Rogue-like-likes cost time. A game with loot boxes, sure, a whale can spend thousands–they miss a hit? That dopamine rush is just another spin away. A Rogue-like-like?  You died, you made a bad decision, you didn’t get to the end? That dopamine rush isn’t just promised by completing the game. It’s soaked into the entire thing. You get a hit on every draw, every placement. Every tiny success is a tiny loot box being opened, chipping away at one big one offering success or failure. 

But the trick is you fail on one, and that entire loot box is taken away. And in an “unfair” rogue-like-like, sometimes that bit loot box just contains “failure”. Nothing you could have done about it.

The game cost you an hour, maybe more, of your life, and said “give me more of your life. You’ll enjoy it. This time you might win! Think how good that would feel.”

Call this moralising if you like, but I know myself, and I find that promise very, very hard to walk away from even when you know the game is rigged. I’m good with money. I’m not good with time. I’m the king of time as a sunk cost–but I also know when I’m having my time wasted.

And Blue Prince wastes your time. 

Look, there are many times in the game that you’ll make a mistake that will end a run. But I also had many runs where it either became obvious I couldn’t win–I never saw the object I needed for a room, or I never saw a room I needed full stop–or that the game just gave me a clear fail state: hands of dead-ends, or most egregiously, only rooms that would block off the antechamber (after I’d unlocked it!)

In these cases, the expectation is, I suppose, that you’re doing something else to help “build” your ability to win on the next run–a classic Rogue-like-like move. Setting aside that I had many (many!) runs where I was able to give myself nothing on the next run–many rooms that give you a “next run” benefit being dead ends or otherwise frustrating if you’re trying to “win” on each run–such design gives the game away that your time is being wasted. You weren’t going to win. Give Blue Prince an hour, it’ll give you a wee bonus next hour. Just one more hit. Aren’t you having fun?

The most egregious thing, however, is that in all of these cases I was trying to “win” the game by doing what it told me the “win” state was–entering the antechamber. I was aware there was a further "room 46" and that Blue Prince is a game of cascading mysteries, but I’m not sure I’ve ever experienced a “fuck you” as blatant as the experience of reaching the antechamber for the first time. I won’t detail it, but Blue Prince does nothing to celebrate or reward you for this, or really any wins. It’s not even justifiable as a critique of the Rogue-like-like loot box: it’s more like being told you’ve been given a present, and being given an near-endless Matryoshka gift box where when you get to the end there’s just a note that says “This isn’t the present.”

It really does feel to me like Blue Prince goes out of its way to waste your time. Much has been made of the “pay attention to everything” puzzles, which can have a cryptic crossword-esque trick to them, but the issue with them as with everything else in this game is that they’re a one-trick pony–and in a Rogue-like-like, you have to see the pony do that trick over and over again! I can see absolutely no reason why after I unlock a safe once I have to go to it and tediously type the code in again every run, but the nadir are the puzzle rooms, where you do things which are barely puzzles. I mean just weeks ago I was trying to find some good in Donkey Kong Jr. Math, where you just do simple math puzzles, but in Blue Prince there’s a room where you literally just do Donkey Kong Jr. Math-level puzzles over and over again! Even if you love Blue Prince’s core and don’t consider multiple runs a waste of time why would you ever want to do any of these puzzles more than once? It’s not like you’re doing something entertaining in itself, like a Picross or something. It’s just… do some maths!

Never mind that if you even want to understand a lot of the early game, you want the Magnifying Glass item, which I didn’t see on like my first… three or four runs (so hours into the game.) Meaning that in maybe my second go I’d unlocked a room, solved the puzzle that would allow me to look at things in that room, and then… gained nothing from it, because I didn’t have another item. I literally solved a puzzle and got nothing. Nothing!!! Too bad, RNG said no.

(To be completely fair to Blue Prince, what persists and what doesn't is strangely inconsistent. A few rooms do keep things set between runs–probably because they involve such a huge amount of running between levers.)

Here’s my take, ultimately. A video game lives or dies on its mechanics. I’ve written previously on the transition between games as pure mechanics–you play them for the joy of play–and narrative–you play them to see the end. A Rogue-like-like is one of the purest attempts to split the difference, and the requirement, in my own framework, is that the game doesn’t misplace the “reward” (i.e. “I beat a run”) in the timescale of “I have seen either all the content or enough content to understand the systems so completely I am no longer surprised.”

Players who love the systems, get, with Rogue-like-like, the ability to play the game as long as they want–like an old school arcade game, almost. Players who want the experience, the reward, can move on feeling good rather than feeling beholden to it. A game like Slay The Spire or Balatro is successful–a winning run is possible from the start, and doesn’t individually take too long, but there’s far more depth if you want it. You can stop whenever you want, because there are no carrots to dangle. Just your own enjoyment.

The joy in Blue Prince’s mechanics becomes short-lived, and I don’t think so much because placing and exploring rooms isn’t fun–it’s because everything around it becomes such a pain. By my last runs, I was literally running full speed through the mansion, and every action I’d done a million times already felt like a punishment. But the insidious promise of success–that my luck would come around, that the RNG would release me–kept me there, like a drunk down bad at the blackjack table. You can say I should know how to walk away. I say: they're done everything in their power to keep me there, and they aren't even playing fair. Who's really to blame?

Blue Prince didn’t respect me, so I stopped respecting it. It has all the worst impulses of Rogue-like-like design all wrapped up into a deceivingly attractive package, and I’ve left it with a completely oppositional viewpoint. I think this game tries to flatter you that you're a genius while really it's turned you into a rat mindlessly pushing a button hoping for treats, a donkey endlessly chasing a carrot that’ll never come.

Logic and reasoning are the reason we’re human, don’t waste them on this.

Will I ever play it again? No, and frankly, it did a lot to make video games feel like a completely waste of my time in general. A truly empty experience.

Final Thought: Above I mentioned that you can beat Blue Prince on a fresh save file. But obviously, no one could beat it first time and I believe, at this point, that RNG would make it impossible to beat the game every time even with full knowledge of the game first (though I’m willing to be proven wrong–it doesn’t change much.) 

*Spoilers follow*

If you’re wondering when I explicitly lost respect for Blue Prince, it actually wasn’t when the Antechamber had a key and a note in it and not even like, an achievement for reaching it (a weak reward, but at least something.) It was when I discovered that the route I’d found to the underground (the fountain) using that key led to… an area where all I could do was move a minecart, and if I tried to change the lake height to get to the actual "endgame" I could no longer use that door. Which led to the realisation I could complete the game without ever actually going to the antechamber first. 

I will give Blue Prince one point here–the game does feature a lot of different routes for solutions–but it’s really there I discovered Matryoshka gift boxes weren’t empty: they were a cascading collection of “fuck you”s.

For example–and this is likely to surprise anyone who has played this–I beat the game without ever placing the "foundation" room. Blue Prince’s RNG is so weirdly punitive I think I only saw it once, or twice, and didn’t place it as I needed other rooms (for real though, why is it a rare room. Why doesn’t it just always come up after the first few runs?) In the end I beat the game by using only the tomb and pump room, which requires an annoying amount of the game’s already annoying RNG and doesn’t even need the key, which made everything I’d spent so much time doing feel like even more a complete waste of time. 

But I'm free now. And I'm never going back.

Every Game I’ve Finished 14>24 is OUT NOW! You can pick it up in paperback, kindle, or epub/pdf. You can also support Every Game I’ve Finished on ko-fi! You can pick up digital copies of exp., a zine featuring all-exclusive writing at my shop, or join as a supporter at just $1 a month and get articles like this a week early.

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Golf (NES)

Developed/Published by: Nintendo Released: 01/05/1984 Completed: 29/03/2025 Completion: Finished all 18 holes. *cough* 50 over par *cough*

Golf. Generally accepted as being invented in my home nation of Scotland, if there’s something we can all agree on about golf, it’s that it’s shit, a terrible use of land (and a terrible use of the huge amounts of water that is needed to maintain the courses on that land) but that it somehow makes for an entertaining video game.

I mean, you don’t have to take my word for it! It was banned multiple times even in Scotland as early as the 1400s because young men should have been practising archery instead, and frankly, maybe if we hadn’t invented it maybe we’d still be an independent country. Although maybe that’s just a sign of not thinking outside of the box. Couldn’t our young men have turned their ability to hit balls with a stick into holes into some sort of a offensive weapon? By the time of golf gunpowder had reached Europe, so imagine pinging grenades towards the English front lines with deadly accuracy…

Uh, where was I?

Oh, yeah, golf. That it’s shit, but it makes a good video game.

Something surprising about golf is that despite it being one of the earliest kinds of games to be turned into a video game–as early as 1970, apparently, with Apawam, a text-based game for mainframes where you’d input your swing and see how close you got to the hole–there really isn’t much history online about it as a genre; it usually just gets shuffled under the umbrella of sports games.

Thing is–there were absolutely fucking loads of golf games in the early days of video games. It’s Pong-like in its ubiquity, but unlike Pong, which is… Pong, golf wasn’t as easy to “solve” for developers, leading to a variety of different interpretations. As usual, Magnavox put out a version as Computer Golf for Odyssey 2, and then Atari (basically) ripped them off with Golf for Atari 2600, but every one had a go, really: 1980’s PGA Golf for Intellivision, 1981 Data East had a go with 18 Holes Pro Golf in arcades,  Taito in 1982 with Birdie King, and so on.

But it wouldn’t be until 1984 where it’s possible our old friend simultaneous discovery showed up that golf games would actually firm up into a genre, and while I’ve absolutely not done enough research (you go through every golf game in Mobygames’ list!) list it really does look like 1984’s Golf for Famicom–from the hand of Shigeru Miyamoto as designer and Satoru Iwata as programmer–is ground zero for what we now know as a golf video game, featuring probably the most important aspect: the “golf swing meter” where you have to hit the button three times: to start, to select your power, and then to manage the amount of curve on the ball by either getting it dead center or to one side–with the tension and skill being in if you can actually get the power and curve you want.

It’s hard to overstate how, even now, this simple mechanic makes Golf extremely playable. The game doesn’t feature any of the niceties of more modern golf games such as automatic club selection (which other games of the era managed, it seems) but it’s otherwise basically all there because golf really is this simple. You hit the ball, and then you hit it again until it goes in the hole, dealing with wind, hazards, and your own poor club choices or inability to get the timing right.

Golf is also a fondly remembered game in Satoru Iwata’s oeuvre, so much so that it was used in a rare (and limited) easter egg on Nintendo Switch. It wasn’t the first game Iwata worked on for Nintendo–according to a 1999 interview in Used Games magazine (via shmuplations) he toiled for two months on a Joust conversion that Nintendo ultimately couldn’t release then programmed Pinball. But it seems like Golf is where he made his name, doing something that no one else could do–fit an 18 hole golf course into the Famicom’s memory.

And it’s a good course! While there aren’t ever that many twists to a golf course, this one features easily understood tricks that make it fun to work out which club to use and how much power to go for–and a nice aspect of golf is that you can’t “fail” a playthrough, so you can just play all 18 holes with the worst possible score and then try again.

There are issues–the short game is near impossible, so you can find yourself racking up insanely high numbers of shots when you have to nudge your ball around rather than hit it any distance–and in the cold light of 2025 a single course isn’t going to keep you warm for very long. But almost every other golf game is inspired by this one, so if you want to play more of this but a different course… just play one of those!

Will I ever play it again? Probably not?

Final Thought: Interestingly, HAL would put out another golf game in 1984, Hole In One for the MSX. The game isn’t dated more specifically, but it’s interesting because it’s got a lot of suspicious similarities to Golf, but doesn’t do the single bar golf swing meter! It splits it into two bars, power and curve–though functionally it still requires three presses. It’s a strange decision, though I wonder if it was to try and simplify, or make clearer the the design compared to Golf.

Well, it didn’t stick–by the time of Hal’s Hole In One for SNES, they’d have gone back to the (by then) traditional golf swing meter.

Every Game I’ve Finished 14>24 is OUT NOW! You can pick it up in paperback, kindle, or epub/pdf. You can also support Every Game I’ve Finished on ko-fi! You can pick up digital copies of exp., a zine featuring all-exclusive writing at my shop, or join as a supporter at just $1 a month and get articles like this a week early.

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Pinball Spire

Developed/Published by: Apparition Games / indie.io Released: 02/10/2024 Completed: 01/04/2025 Completion: Finished it.

I’ve been having a lot of luck picking recent games largely on a whim, so after I polished off Children Of The Sun my interest was piqued by the idea of a “pinballvania” and more or less started this immediately. And it’s… eh… fine? I guess?

It’s always a bit awkward to write about a game that you don’t have any strong feelings about–something you can’t be very effusive about, but can’t really stick the boot in either. So I’ll just try and be constructive.

Pinball Spire is an attempt to take the play of pinball–you interact with the game’s main character by hitting them with flippers or launchers with the aim of hitting targets–and merge that with an action adventure, so rather than just playing on a single playfield to get a high score, your actions are intended to help you progress further through the game.

Generally, that’s as simple as hitting targets to open the door to the next playfield, but the game intends to fit the aforementioned idea of a “pinballvania” so you’re also unlocking abilities that should, in theory, be allowing you to navigate the playfields in different ways and open up new directions to travel.

The thing is though… that’s not really what happens. Pinball Spire’s design is extremely linear, and while metroidvanias are usually more about the illusion of freedom for the average player, Pinball Spire doesn’t have you re-navigate playfields until the end, and it (very oddly) doesn’t include anything in those earlier playfields that your new abilities unlock!

At best, a couple of times the game plans for you to travel onto a screen, realise you can’t beat it, return to the previous screen, go in the other direction, and quickly unlock one of the abilities that will help you progress. The game does have a strict gating with some doors that can’t be opened unless you have enough currency, but in every case by the time I got to them I had enough currency. In fact, you’d only not have enough currency if you were like, super good at pinball.

So the game lacks literally any of the “oh, I’ll come back here later” that makes for a good metroidvania, and indeed the only time you do significant backtracking is at the end of the game to get to the end of the game, and it’s extremely annoying when it happens!

The funny thing is though: Pinball Spire is a decent enough pinball game if you take it as one. The goals are all pretty clear, and while the physics can be as annoying as in any pinball game, the special abilities do a lot to help you (there’s a slowdown ability for aiming that’s a lifesaver). The main issues you’ll have are when you’re out of mana and can’t use them (which can often be a frustrating trek backwards to a save point for a refresh) or when you’re trying to get off the bloody playfield you’re on as you’ve opened the gate to the next–certain playfields make it insanely annoying (there’s one otherwise quite interesting one with an orrey theme that I found a nightmare to get off.)

Also: there’s no way to game over. In a weird way this is good, but it’s also bad. It’s good because if this game was like… a pinball roguelike-like and you had to start it over from the beginning again or whatever, people would be snapping their Steam Decks in half. It’s bad because there’s none of the thrill of pinball, really–you know that feeling when you’re trying to stop the ball from falling between the flippers? Here you either feel nothing,  because it’s just going to come back on screen, or boredom, because you know the playfield it’s going to fall back onto is going to be a complete slog to get back off. Some peril–even if it’s just restarting from the playfield you’re on–feels like it would be justified.

So Pinball Spire isn’t great, which I put down to a failure of imagination in the macro level design rather than in the individual playfield design (well apart from that orrey, which can fuck off.) But it’s close. Maybe they’ll get it with a sequel.

Will I ever play it again? No thanks! I didn’t get all of the collectibles or anything, but I’m not that great at pinball so I probably played this longer than needed.

Final Thought: This isn’t the only twist on pinball out there–Rollers of the Realm was out years ago and I’ve never tried it, and I’ll admit I’m intrigued by the more peggle-like Peglin (though that’s a roguelike-like, so I’m definitely concerned about the potential for Steam Deck snappage.)

Every Game I’ve Finished 14>24 is OUT NOW! You can pick it up in paperback, kindle, or epub/pdf. You can also support Every Game I’ve Finished on ko-fi! You can pick up digital copies of exp., a zine featuring all-exclusive writing at my shop, or join as a supporter at just $1 a month and get articles like this a week early.

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Prince Of Prussia (PICO-8) This post is for subscribers only! You can subscribe for just $1 a month at https://ko-fi.com/mathewkumar, but if you don’t fancy that, there’s years of articles in our archive.

(And if you're interested in Prince Of Prussia, you can just play it!)

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Donkey Kong Jr. Math (NES)

Developed/Published by: Nintendo Released: 27/08/1983 Completed: 29/03/2025 Completion: I can do basic arithmetic! I mean I could do it before. But I still can, so I didn’t get any worse at least.

After playing Gomoku Narabe Renju I had a choice: re-learn how to play mahjong so I could play the fifth ever game released on the Famicom or jump over to Donkey Kong Jr. Math because I hadn’t looked at that yet either.

I suppose there were other choices I could have made, but I got fixated on the fact I couldn’t find my copy of Clubhouse Games which I was pretty sure would teach me how to play mahjong again, so I decided what with me already knowing basic arithmetic, I should just look at one of Nintendo’s early attempts at edutainment (the other, “Popeye’s English Play” would only be released in Japan for obvious reason.)

Now, as we all know there’s “good” edutainment that we’re all fond of–your Oregon Trails and Carmen Sandiego’s–and there’s “bad” edutainment, things like Basic Math for the Atari 2600 (which I wrote about in exp. 2600). I think you can tell which one Donkey Kong Jr. Math is going to be.

It’s not just that it’s a maths game. It’s that like so many educational games, they somehow think that the action of doing something educational–in this case, a calculation–is enough to make it a game. Sure, in Donkey Kong Jr. Math you interact with the maths in the same way you’d play Donkey Kong Jr.–control Jr. and make him climb vines–but in every case you’re doing this to collect a number or operator to complete a calculation!

This is, obviously, very boring!

To be completely fair to Donkey Kong Jr. Math, I’m sure almost everyone played it single player, but it’s obvious that the game’s main mode, “Calculate” is meant to be played in two-player, competing to use the numbers hanging on vines and operators to calculate the number Donkey Kong is holding up before your opponent does. It’s entirely possible that the gang at Nintendo led by Toshihiko Nakago had great fun competing at this, and I suppose if you had an NES in a classroom this might be an entertaining way to do an arithmetic competition. 

But I’m absolutely grasping at straws, because absolutely no one did this and anyone who had this cart at home absolutely had Super Mario Bros. or literally any other cart that they’d rather play. Like if you had a friend round, they’d absolutely rather sit and watch you play Mario hoping you’d give them a go than do maths. No one wants to do maths!

Will I ever play it again? If I get hit very hard on the head and forget basic arithmetic… sure.

Final Thought: I’m sure that much like Gomoku Narabe Renju and Mahjong were Nintendo’s attempt to make the system suit adults, this was an attempt to offer a thin veil of respectability to the console as more than just a game system along with Popeye’s English Play, and was supposed to be followed by “Donkey Kong’s Music Play” which–in its Famicom rendition at least–was absurdly planned to feature the ability to sing karaoke via the second controller’s microphone! It seems not to have happened for a few possible reasons: that it wasn’t fun, that there were copyright issues with included songs, or that it was just too hard to fit a music game on an early Famicom cartridge.

Something I have to consider, actually is that above I said “anyone who had this cart at home absolutely had … literally any other cart that they’d rather play” but in 1983 some Japanese children could have a Famicom at home and such well-meaning parents that they only had this and Popeye’s English Play for the system! Absolutely tragic.

Every Game I’ve Finished 14>24 is OUT NOW! You can pick it up in paperback, kindle, or epub/pdf. You can also support Every Game I’ve Finished on ko-fi! You can pick up digital copies of exp., a zine featuring all-exclusive writing at my shop, or join as a supporter at just $1 a month and get articles like this a week early.

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Children of The Sun

Developed/Published by: Réne Rother / Devolver Digital Released: 09/04/2024 Completed: 30/03/2025 Completion: Finished it (and with all but a couple of achievements, too.)

Looking for more 2024 games that I could polish off quickly after Mouthwashing, I saw this recommended in Aurahack’s Top 10 of 2024 and it just sounded and looked extremely cool: a scribbly neon sniper game where you only get one bullet per level and have to guide the bullet between enemies to take them all down in one shot.

And… it is cool! Despite being “Devolver Digital”-core with the violence and the neon and that, it ploughs a different furrow than the likes of Hotline Miami, as the player takes the role of “THE GIRL” who, filthy and insane, attempts to destroy the cult that took everything from her using her psychic powers. The game is, ultimately, a puzzle game of first observation (finding and tagging enemies in the level) and then path-finding (planning the order in which to take down said enemies) but the atmosphere is what makes it: the visuals are clear in play, but emphasise a world gone wrong, and the soundscapes created by Aiden Baker, experimental ambience with a gothic-western flair, get you completely in the headspace of a ruthless hunter.

Importantly, the narrative gets out of its own way, being told just enough to be evocative, but not so much that it overpowers “vibes” with “details.”

I don't know why but the promo shots Devolver Digital created don't really capture how the game looks or how it plays. The launch trailer is ok, but Sleigh Bells isn't actually the vibe...

It’s simply a cool game to hang out in–long periods of observance and planning followed by sudden flashes of extreme and cathartic violence. The game builds sensibly upon the foundation so that by the end of the game you’re equipped with a rational amount of ways to manipulate the bullet and facing a reasonable amount of enemies with special abilities that force you to think laterally, and then the entire thing over before you’re bored of the systems.

If I was really to complain, it’s that latter levels (unfortunately) do layer all the systems over slightly too many enemies, and failing on your one shot and having to do it all over again does become a bit of a pain in the arse–particularly because some enemies, also psychically equipped, can place a time pressure on you once you’ve fired your bullet (oh no, “pressure/puzzle” rears its head again!) By the end you have to not just meticulously plan your moves but how you’ll execute them, using a rapid turn here, or accepting that you’ll have to aim more quickly than the game has trained you to there.

For me, the last level particularly came close to spoiling the whole thing, because the game’s pleasure in play is that your failures are educational–you might fire off a shot just to find out how to navigate the level–but once you start failing repeatedly because you can’t execute your plan perfectly, it becomes frustrating rather than a clean march towards catharsis.

But I don’t mean to beat up on Children Of The Sun too much. It’s possible I got hyper-focused on my own specific solutions. And I’d call the game itself “focused” rather than short, because you can beat it, feel you got your money’s worth and not, particularly, feel like you want more (the time spent stymied probably helps with this.) I could probably tear through a bunch more easy levels, but it would be empty calories, and the design doesn’t support longer levels with ever more complex enemy and bullet interactions.

I mean this game is the bullet–it might take a couple of detours, but it hits the mark and doesn’t waste your time getting there.

Will I ever play it again? There’s a horde mode, but I couldn’t be bothered with it.

Final Thought: Unusually, Children Of The Sun is also a game where doing the achievements is a reward in and of itself, because they almost all offer an interesting and fun challenge on the level to go for that (generally) doesn’t make finishing the level more annoying or anything. I didn’t do them all–as I said, some of the later levels are just a touch too long–but I’d recommend trying for them on each level you play (but not being too bothered if you don’t manage them.)

Every Game I’ve Finished 14>24 is OUT NOW! You can pick it up in paperback, kindle, or epub/pdf. You can also support Every Game I’ve Finished on ko-fi! You can pick up digital copies of exp., a zine featuring all-exclusive writing at my shop, or join as a supporter at just $1 a month and get articles like this a week early.

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Gomoku Narabe Renju (NES)

Developed/Published by: Nintendo Released: 27/08/1983 Completed: Er… Completion: Well, I’ve managed to win a few games against the easiest CPU, but never take a full match. Something I’ve always been interested in is that when you look at history, all anyone cares about is the hits. Nintendo is probably the most famous video game company of all time, and yet swathes of games they’ve released go almost completely unremarked. Gomoku Narabe Renju is a perfect example: it’s literally the fourth game released for Famicom (well, released on the same day as Mahjong) and, you know… no one cares. Well, someone at Nintendo Japan remembered it, and it was released again on the Japanese version of Switch Online last year in what felt like a bit of a “let’s just dump what’s left” update (they even stuck up Urban Champion finally!) so I thought I’d take a look at it. It wouldn’t be wrong to say that no one cares about this one because it is, well, a board game. And not even a “full” adaptation of Go, but an adaptation of the tic-tac-toe/Connect Four-adjacent game, Gomoku, that can be played on the same board. In some respects it’s an interesting release because along with Mahjong it represents the only games for “grown-ups” that Nintendo would do for the system for a long time (apart from possibly Golf) and as only the second batch of games, you do have to wonder if it fit into some sort of strategy for the system or if–as seemingly was often the case if you’ve watched say Jeremy Parish cover the many obscure systems that competed with the Famicom–it’s simply that knocking up some board game adaptations is easier and quicker than other options when you want to bulk up your game library. Almost certainly chosen because adapting Go would have been impossible (a Go title wouldn’t show up till 1987 with Igo: Kyuu Roban Taikyoku designed by Henk Rogers, which only manages a 9x9 board) “Gomoku” is quickly understood as connect five: you’re placing stones one after another, trying to make a row of five or block your opponent from doing so. Unfortunately Gomoku–known as Gomoku Narabe, or “five piece line-up” in Japan–is, as many ancient games are, flawed. The first player (black) has a large advantage, leading to the “Renju” version of the game, which includes a few extremely inelegant rules updates that restrict the black player alone:

Black can’t place a piece that would create two open lines of three stones, or place a piece that creates two open lines of four stones.

Black can’t win with a line of 6 or more–it has to be a row of exactly five.

In addition, every game follows a set series of “opening” moves which attempt to balance the game even further. As you lose the game immediately if you fall foul to any of these rules, what this means in practice is that every game of Gomoku Narabe Renju is a headache of watching out for edge cases and frustration as you navigate yourself into winnable positions that are actually automatic losses. Now, with these rules the game is (apparently) fairly balanced, though complex, but for a newcomer Gomuku Narabe Renju takes absolutely no prisoners. While there are three difficulty levels, after playing for more time than I’d like to admit I can’t beat the easiest AI even half the time. Although I find all the rule bodges in the name of fairness inelegant, I will say that the game design does, somewhat, have the same kind of “grand battle” feel that a real game of Go does (which I’m shite at, too.) You really feel the flow of attack and defence as you place your pieces; there’s a clear shift and feeling as you’re on the back foot, constantly placing stones to stop lines being made, and then an amazing feeling when you can push that tide back and force your opponent into that position–as you both attempt to strengthen your lines as you do so. The original simplicity is, honestly, quite beautiful, and it probably does serve, somewhat, as an on-ramp to Go and its own simulation of battle. However, it’s not really a great video game–easily forgotten, easy to go unremarked. At best a competent adaptation for those who already loved the game and didn’t have any friends (or a pen and paper, which is all you actually need to play this!) Will I ever play it again? I have a pen and paper; I can imagine playing Gomoku again, but not this version.

Final Thought: If you want to play this, pleasantly there is a full English translation out there–so you can at least understand why you’re getting your ass beat.

Every Game I’ve Finished 14>24 is OUT NOW! You can pick it up in paperback, kindle, or epub/pdf. You can also support Every Game I’ve Finished on ko-fi! You can pick up digital copies of exp., a zine featuring all-exclusive writing at my shop, or join as a supporter at just $1 a month and get articles like this a week early.

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Mouthwashing

Developed/Published by: Wrong Organ / Critical Reflex Released: 26/09/2024 Completed: 07/01/2025 Completion: Finished it.

If you can’t tell, recently I’ve been trying to play more games from 2024 to “catch up” on the zeitgeist, and it’s definitely been revealing to me that we live in a golden age of short, interesting video games. The kind of thing where you look it up on How Long To Beat and decide to just get it and install it immediately, because you can get through it. It doesn’t need to go on a backlog! You can just play it!

Imagine how “final facial expression from that Vince McMahon ["bad man!"--Ed.] meme” I was when I saw Mouthwashing was literally two hours.

I mean that’s the length of a movie! 

I praised Indika heavily for its incredible high fidelity visuals, saying something along the lines of “it wouldn’t work otherwise” so I rather like that along comes Mouthwashing, a similarly narrative-heavy game that looks like a PS1 game and… also looks fucking amazing and works! Turns out–and stick with me here–”art direction” might be a more important component of video games than “it looks real.” Indika uses high fidelity pointedly. Mouthwashing uses low fidelity pointedly.

A psychological horror game set on a crashed, “blue collar future” space freighter (think Alien) you play the ship’s acting captain across a series of months as the food slowly runs out and the remaining crew–including yourself–get increasingly unmoored from reality; while as the player, you start to understand what’s really going on and what really happened.

I’ll be straight, immediately: I liked Mouthwashing, but I didn’t love it. It does some things incredibly well–it uses glitches and crashes that make you think the game has actually hung to transition across the non-linear narrative, and it’s always effective–but it doesn’t really come together.

In some respects, the game suffers from the fact I played Indika almost directly before it, a game that nails its interactivity when it matters (well, apart from those retro game flashbacks, but they dont linger in the mind.) Mouthwashing feels more like a visual novel where you have to walk between nodes for the most part (nothing wrong with that) but there are moments where it expects you to play it like a game, and due to the fact that it can’t suddenly go out of its way to explain mechanics to you, there’s a lot of stumbling about and failing which, sadly, pull you right out of the narrative that it’s trying to get you deeper into. And then the feedback for the mechanics are so poor you might not be entirely sure you're even doing it right (I had to look up at least one section as a result. Not ideal.)

To be frank, also, the story doesn’t actually pay off. There’s a lot of interesting world-building in Mouthwashing–I love the reveal of what the ship is carrying, and how pointless it makes everything feel–but the characters are poorly sketched, without a lot of depth (the one female character, who is so important to the whole thing, is terribly served) and I think it makes the extremely heavy implications of the denoument feel sort of problematic. While I won’t spoil anything, I think there is a certain care you have to have over the kind of character you are asking the player to embody, and I don’t think Mouthwashing takes enough care over that.

However: the game does manage to be successfully creepy at points, and has an excellent line in low-poly body horror; I think it’s meaningful it’s trying to be more than just that. It may simply be a case of a team reaching for something they aren’t quite equipped for–but I respect them for giving it a shot.

Will I ever play it again? I don’t think I’ll ever need to.

Final Thought: Mouthwashing takes two hours, it’s interesting, it’s trying something, it looks amazing. More games should be doing this. Maybe they are! I love it.

Every Game I’ve Finished 14>24 is OUT NOW! You can pick it up in paperback, kindle, or epub/pdf. You can also support Every Game I’ve Finished on ko-fi! You can pick up digital copies of exp., a zine featuring all-exclusive writing at my shop, or join as a supporter at just $1 a month and get articles like this a week early.

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Tales Of The Unknown: Volume I: The Bard’s Tale

Developed/Published by: Interplay Productions / EA (original), Krome Studios / InXile Entertainment (remaster) Released: 12/1985 Completed: 05/02/2025 Completion: Finished it.

I’ve been itching to play an old school western RPG recently–really want to see some numbers go up–and got really excited when I discovered The Gold Box Companion, a companion app for SSI’s legendary Dungeons and Dragons RPGs that–because I was too young for them at the time–completely passed me by.

However… I couldn’t help but feel I’d be skipping a bit too far forward on my (personally imposed) chronology if I jumped to playing Pools of Radiance–I wasn’t satisfied when I played Pirates! that I had the historical context I wanted–that I nosed around a bit to see if there was something I’d previously skipped that might fit the bill.

Hence: The Bard’s Tale.

Now, I’d previously skipped this because I’d heard that it was, frankly, a bit boring. Actually, I was basing that entirely on The Digital Antiquarian saying “long before the end of the first Bard’s Tale it’s starting to get a bit tedious” which probably isn’t entirely fair. But what drew me back was that The Bard’s Tale is one of those games that I think many who grew up in the “video game magazine” generation have–a game that I read about two sentences about but was always longing for.

It’s funny the things that lodge in your mind, isn’t it? Here’s the reader’s letter from Amstrad Action that’s stuck with me since literally 1991:

“Well, if this dork wants it so badly, it must be great!”

What’s funny is that in the intervening, uh, thirty years [“lies. The 90s are ten years ago”–Ed.] I managed to forget, I guess, that Amstrad Action’s “Balrog” ran an entire “The Bard’s Tale Club” section culminating with a short walkthrough just a few issues earlier. 

Interestingly, I think this is one of those things where I can see myself maturing in real time–in the matter of months I went from a wean who skipped the Balrog section because it wasn’t about, like, arcade games, to a wee guy who was at least interested in them. That or a guy pretending to be a gnome caught my eye.

All I remember is that I’d missed my chance to get The Bard’s Tale. So, here I am, thirty [“ten… I’ll go as far as fifteen”–Ed.] years later, finally living my childish dreams.

First: if I’d got this in 1991 I’d have been completely baffled by it. Within a few short years I’d be playing Ultima Underworld, but I didn’t really even play that properly, and The Bard’s Tale requires, like Wizardry, a deep understanding of RPG character creation and party management. And also like Wizardry, it’s about as brutal as an RPG can get, killing your party or giving them debilitating, expensive-to-cure status effects that require you shlep all the way back to a temple to solve, in maps that wrap (no! Not again!!!) and are absolutely louping with spinners, traps and dark zones.

In some respects, I’m lucky that I mostly relied on luck and parental largesse to get computer games.

I’m also lucky that there’s a remake of The Bard’s Tale in the form of Krome Studios’ The Bards Tale Trilogy: Remastered, which rights-holder InXile Entertainment had them make (after, interestingly, a remaster from the team of one of the original developers, Rebecca Heineman unfortunately fell through). I’ll be honest, I was originally not planning on playing it, because it has genuinely awful Super2xSal-quality upscaled art. The game looks like this:

When in its best contemporary ports, it looked like this:

I know which I’d rather look at, though in some respects I thank god that the remake came out before they could us AI to upscale it all and make something that looked even worse. The benefit of playing this (nasty) looking versions outweigh the pain of looking at it though, because not only does it make a lot of quality of life improvements such as a shared inventory and doubled experience, it plays perfectly with a controller–so you can even play it with a Steam Deck comfortably.

If you’re a purist, however (and I don’t actually blame you) I have to admit that the version I played isn’t exactly The Bard’s Tale, as the “trilogy” version aligns all three games design, so in this version there are distance mechanics in the combat (enemies can start some distance from you and you have to advance on them) and bows and arrows are added, which I suspect changes the feel of the combat quite a bit. But to be honest, I can live with it. And I never used bows and arrows anyway.

Enough personal history. For the real history, you can of course go to someone like the aforementioned Digital Antiquarian, but it’s worth noting that even though The Bard’s Tale entered my own personal history in 1991, it was released in 1985 and is, I think surprisingly to modern eyes, the best selling computer RPG of the 1980s, selling a reported 407,000 copies.

I say surprisingly because The Bard’s Tale hasn’t lingered in the cultural imagination the way that RPGs such as Wizardry or Ultima have. It wasn’t first; it didn’t inspire much (Japanese RPGs were already divergent by 1985) and the series didn’t evolve any better than Wizardry did. By 1991, the year I discovered it, a cash-in construction set was released for anyone who hadn’t already moved on to the more active style of dungeon crawler begat by Dungeon Master, and it wouldn’t be seen again until The Bard’s Tale in 2004, which is a Bard’s Tale game in name only.

If you’re wondering what made The Bard’s Tale so successful, but then so irrelevant, it comes down to the fact that it is, ultimately, just a Wizardry clone that happened to come out on the popular C64 with nicer graphics than Wizardry years before Wizardry would reach the system, and be pushed by the already mature (and not yet fully soulless) EA.

Designed by Michael Cranford, it was his second attempt to directly make a Wizardry killer after HesWare’s apparently flawed Maze Master. For some reason, The Bard’s Tale is particularly known for the development team all sniping at each other publicly for years after the game’s launch (it even makes the Wikipedia) but it’s all so “he said, she said” and feels kind of… un-illuminating about the game. At least, it doesn’t add anything. The only part I find particularly interesting is that this game is officially called “Tales Of The Unknown: Volume I: The Bard’s Tale” because (and there is some argument over this) the series was supposed to be called “Tales Of The Unknown” but–and this might be a sign of EA’s encroaching soullessness–it was felt “The Bard’s Tale” was better known, so it got dropped.

(And if you’re wondering why I find that interesting, it’s because it would happen again with The Legend of Kyrandia, which was actually supposed to be the “Fables & Fiends” series. I’m not sure how many more examples of this there are.)

Anyway. As I said above, writing about the experience of playing The Bard’s Tale feels almost exactly like writing about Wizardry, bar for a few twists (I like to believe if they’d kept to “Tales Of The Unknown” maybe the sequels would have diverged more.) The main twist people get excited about is that you navigate the town in the same way that you navigate the dungeons (step-by-step 3D movement) but let me tell you this–it just means you have to do an annoying amount of schlepping about and fighting piddly enemies when you want to heal or level up, and I’d honestly rather a menu. The thing I felt like I felt I did the most in The Bard's Tale was stand around outside the "Review Board" save scumming to try and make sure my level up rolls were good...

The rest of the game, despite featuring several dungeons, ultimately boils down to what you’ll do in Wizardry–try and find the best way to grind so you can kill the final boss. In the original game, this was a particular repeatable battle, which led to one of my best ever “this is too specific, that’s not how memes work” memes, clattering out to complete silence:

But in the remake, which has a smoother curve (and only lets you do this battle once) you can get away with just ordinary grinding (thankfully). Now, the game does actually feature some puzzle solving–you do have to find and collect certain items–but moreso than Wizardry, I realized how much I miss a “proper” quest and side-quest system. Here you have to notice text prompts when you step in certain squares (which zoom off the screen immediately in the remake which means you’ll never see them–a big mistake) and piece them together, but getting deeper into dungeons is grimly unrewarding when that’s all you get. I started my game mapping this properly, but the maps get worse than Wizardry even faster! So much of the dungeons in this game are made up of "dark" squares that you feel like you're navigating almost the entire game blind, to the point where I almost can’t imagine trying to complete this without having another map at hand and the in-game automap (I can hear the hardcore crusty RPG types rolling their eyes here…) 

It could be alleviated, perhaps, if you could enjoy the combat, but there is almost no strategy to it. While it may partially be a flaw of the remake (where the updates fly off the screen at a hundred miles an hour) The Bard’s Tale has a bizarre difficulty scaling where you start by having your entire team killed by a single mouse holding a feather duster and about an hour later are fighting a squad of forty vampires at once. While it’s extremely funny to imagine them trying to all squeeze into a corridor, the problem is that your melee characters are just meat shields for your magic users. I made myself up the kind of squad that gets recommended for The Bard’s Tale and as much effort as I put into my critical-hit focused “Hunter” character (usually my favourite kind of RPG character! I love them crits!) I barely noticed them doing anything at all with their piddly single hit on one enemy compared to my magic users, who by mid-game have a spell that can wipe out every enemy you're facing in a battle at once.

The game’s focus on the magic users makes it seem even odder that the series ended up going under The Bard’s Tale moniker. While your melee types are stuck in their starting class, your magic users are expected to change class each time they fill their classes’ spellbook, and they start again from level one keeping all their stats (quite unlike Wizardry…) meaning that by the end of the game you have spellcasters who look like Arnold Schwarzenegger in his prime hiding behind a flesh wall. The only reason you can’t ignore melee completely is that your magic users' armour class is so bad–and that matters when you’re facing off against four squads of sixty enemies at least some of whom might get an individual hit off each before you’re able to hit them with the equivalent of a nuclear bomb.

(This magic user focus is symbolic of author intent, however. As Michael Cranford would explain in his GDC post-mortem of The Bard's Tale and its sequel, he was "bored" by melee combat and was interested in making a game with seven different spell-casting classes that your characters would learn until they were able to become archmages, with melee combat your fallback when you ran out of mana. Although this was cut back to four classes with the archmage showing up in the sequel, this original idea explains everything about why The Bard's Tale plays the way it does.)

But let’s be real here: the majority of The Bard’s Tale you spend not save-scumming level ups to make sure your spell-casters can mow down enemies like they’ve got a gatling gun is spend stumbling around in the dark or in battles you barely notice happening. The only real moments of tension are when you get given one of the many annoying status effects (reload–it’s not worth the hassle) or when you have to get out of the dungeon, because the game (sort of interestingly?) gives you absolutely no way to regenerate mana unless you're outside*, so your grinding sessions are always limited by how long your mana lasts. But because you get so many level-ups with your magic users, it’s not much of a problem (by the middle of the game, I was staying down collecting three or four level ups before bothering to climb back out of a dungeon.)

*You can find magic items that let you regenerate mana in dungeons but I never found any. And there's the occasional regen spot in a dungeon, but I only found a couple. So the point stands, largely.

The problem, sometimes, with playing a game like this is that devoid of the context–an old home computer, months of free time, it being the fucking 1980s–you play it as the object it is, rather than the experience it represented. Everything I’ve said is all true, but if you were loading this up on your C64 (or Amstrad!) with a bundle of paper maps in front of you and the latest “Bard’s Tale Club” tips, nursing your RPG party across months, slowly getting deeper into each dungeon, finding and writing down all the clues, I can see The Bard’s Tale as the evolution–a small evolution, but an evolution–of the Wizardry design it is.

You could recreate this if you really wanted! But the problem is that there are simply more fun, deeper, more interesting, less punishing ways to spend your time not even now–even then. Playing the first The Bard’s Tale, the same as playing the first Wizardry, you understand why they died out so quickly for not adapting. When they aren’t all you’ve got, they aren’t what you want.

The funny thing is, that I’ll still remember The Bard’s Tale fondly. Not for when I played it–but when I imagined it.

It looked like this on the CPC, too. Still better.

Will I ever play it again? You can continue the series seamlessly in The Bard’s Tale Trilogy, but the dungeons in the first game are so horrible I would never do this to myself.

Final Thought: Alright, you’ve read everything I’ve written and you still want to play this. You want to say you’ve played the most important RPGs! I get it. Well, for just $1 you can support my ko-fi and get access to my article on How to beat The Bard’s Tale!

Every Game I’ve Finished 14>24 is OUT NOW! You can pick it up in paperback, kindle, or epub/pdf. You can also support Every Game I’ve Finished on ko-fi! You can pick up digital copies of exp., a zine featuring all-exclusive writing at my shop, or join as a supporter at just $1 a month and get articles like this a week early.

[everygame]

How to Beat: The Bard's Tale

Doing things a little bit differently here at exp. Towers--this week supporters got an epic article on The Bard's Tale but today they're also getting a complete walkthrough of the game that's going to remain a supporter exclusive. Why not support me for just $1 and get to read it? It's the best one on the entire internet!!!

[everygame]

Cuphead

Developed/Published by: Studio MDHR Released: 17/09/2017 Completed: 29/01/2025 Completion: Finished it.

Well, it’s only taken nearly 8 years but I returned to Cuphead after bouncing off it immediately at launch, but I get Cuphead now. Apologies if this has been obvious to you for almost a decade, but… it’s Alien Soldier.

Cuphead is just Alien Soldier!!!

While in some respects, this is a mea culpa, let me stick to my guns by saying that Cuphead does close to doing nothing to explain what it’s trying to do, and actively seems to obscure it. When you start playing the game unless you’re extremely contrary, the very first thing you’ll do is play one of the game’s (rare!) Run ‘n Gun levels, which, and I am not being hyperbolic, is absolutely miserable. The level is immediately insanely busy, while Cuphead controls well, feedback on your attacks is terrible, hitboxes are unforgiving, and with only 3 hit points and no way to recover, you’ll die quickly.

If you’re me, it will just seem like a “git gud” ballache that isn’t worth your time.

The thing is, Cuphead is Alien Soldier. It’s not Metal Slug. It’s not even really Gunstar Heroes (even if it does take a bunch of inspiration from it.) The game is a succession of boss battles, not video game levels.

The Run ‘n Gun levels are just boss battles.

I dunno, maybe this was obvious to you. The levels are not to be played and reacted to. They are, as the rest of the game, to be practiced and learned.

Now, they’re still–I’d say– one of the worst parts of the game, in that they’re some of the least balanced content (in my opinion.) The trick with Cuphead, though–which isn’t immediately learned–is that almost no part of the game is more than about two minutes long!

In some respects, Cuphead is a more perfect example of video game form and function than I could have imagined. Visually inspired by the rhythmic cartoons of the 1930s but design inspired by the strict boss battles of the 90s, each level is a short “cartoon” that you have to play to the beat of to complete. 

It’s interesting. You have almost no “play” in the expressive sense–a Cuphead level is played almost like a song, where you are just one member in the band. You can riff a little, but it’s no jam–everyone else is playing to the sheet, and if you miss your cue, it’s all going to come tumbling down.

It does, of course, make me wonder again as to the value of these certain kinds of play. In seeing Cuphead through, I had to dedicate myself to learning each level and boss battle till I could play it from memory. I could have dedicated that time to learning how to play an actual song with an instrument. You could argue that the value I got was in seeing the obviously incredible art, but I mean… I could just look at that. 

But as I said above: every level is only about two minutes long, and I was surprised to discover that I’m generally “gud” enough at this exact kind of video game that once I learned what I was supposed to be doing (memorisation, not reacting) I was able to polish this off in under eight hours total, with (probably) about two of those on the unbelievably annoying, blatantly Gunstar Heroes-inspired Casino boss-rush that more or less caps the game.

You will see this what feels like eleven billion times.

That boss-rush, I think, sums up the weirdest thing about Cuphead, a game that famously took seven years to complete, because it's the one part where you'll actually sit with the game's art and animation because you'll be stuck there for so long. Otherwise? Cuphead is full of insanely carefully made art an animation that you see for like… a few seconds, and which is never used again. It’s so… conflicting. 

On one hand, it does actually look amazing. On the other, any “normal” game developer, on creating an insanely expressive walking plant (or whatever) would go “alright, that’s the base enemy for the first world” and make a bunch of levels featuring it. Here it’s in about a third of one level then never seen again. There are entire bosses that I saw once because I beat them quickly (turns out I was particularly good at the levels which are shooters?) 

(On the other, special third hand, I will admit that packing the game with filler just because you made a bunch of incredible assets isn't actually an improvement. But here there's no time to get comfortable with anything, never mind luxuriate in it, unless you really just want to replay the game on higher difficulties. Which I don't.)

Another part of the game a “normal” game developer might have issue with is that the enemies and bosses have such specific and expressive animations and routines that there’s no place for actual feedback. There are no interrupts; as you shoot an enemy, some white flashes are the most you’re going to get. If I’m being completely fair, this was often true in the 90s, but I’m not sure I’ve ever played a game where my shots felt so… irrelevant. Like, they’re absolutely not, you have to be hitting the enemies, but as they cycle through their heavily animated stages, there’s this sense that they’d just… still do it if you weren’t shooting them. You actually don’t have any sense of how close you were to changing stages or defeating them unless you die.

So the part of the game that’s going to stick with you is the Casino, because it’s where the game design “shines” the most, while also being the most annoying (as it breaks the “two minute” rule.) There are nine bosses each of whom could be used as an entire boss in any other platformer, and by the end they were burned into my mind, as I had to work out how to most efficiently get through the level through my weapon and power up selections (though I haven’t highlighted it, that every boss is a puzzle of working out which loadout works best for you is one of the most enjoyable parts, and most obviously Alien Solider-inspired.) 

It turned out that after beating my head against it using the “smoke bomb” dodge–which was allowing me to cheap out on a few of the earlier bosses–it turned out that it was better for me to take the earlier pain by using the P. Sugar (one free automatic parry) which would allow me to more easily beat the final boss of the stage.

It’s something that I wouldn’t have worked out if I hadn’t had to play it for so long, but did I enjoy that? Well, I felt the incredible shiver of relief endorphins on my winning run, but I can’t especially say it was worth it.

There’s a lot of artistry in Cuphead to go with a single-minded dedication to a particular kind of game design. I can say now that I respect it for what it is, and I’m glad it was over quickly.

Will I ever play it again? There’s a DLC, but I don’t actively see the point. This is one of those “ok, I get it” kind of games.

Final Thought: As I mentioned above, Cuphead took seven years, and as a game developer myself, I can’t help but wonder about some… inconsistencies(?) in the game’s setting that make me wonder if they were fixes to make up for cuts. Notably, not every cut-scene is animated, with some following a “storybook” format and some not, and the “storybook” concept doesn’t make any sense because all of the other signifiers imply that you’re not reading a book you’re watching a classic cartoon. 

If it was a result of late changes, as a video game developer myself I can relate… whatever you have to do to get the game out the door in the end!

Every Game I’ve Finished 14>24 is OUT NOW! You can pick it up in paperback, kindle, or epub/pdf. You can also support Every Game I’ve Finished on ko-fi! You can pick up digital copies of exp., a zine featuring all-exclusive writing at my shop, or join as a supporter at just $1 a month and get articles like this a week early.