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Dig Dig Dino! (Playdate): COMPLETED!

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Season Two of the Playdate games have started arriving, and the first one I worked through is this lovely little archaeology title, where you dig down and find bones and… well, you do that a lot.

It reminds me a lot of SteamWorld Dig, although it isn’t a platformer and has (almost) no combat, but progression is similar. The deeper you dig, the more energy it takes to dig, so you buy upgrades (with money earned from things you’ve dug up) that give you more energy or let you dig more easily or deeper. Unlike SteamWorld Dig, it’s viewed from above rather than the side, so you have wider areas of things to uncover, and there’s a bit of a puzzle element as some rocks and things need to be fully uncovered before you can destroy them and dig underneath.

Another thing that is similar to SteamWorld Dig is the twist that I won’t be revealing. If you’ve played that game, then when you get to a certain point in this game you’ll realise the same thing!

It’s a pretty simple game, but there’s a moreish gameplay loop as you finish each run with usually just enough money to buy upgrades to get you just a little further next time. It’s clearly been tuned to keep you coming back, as every run seems to get you something new.

Donkey Kong (Switch): COMPLETED!

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I’ve always loved this game. It’s the Game Boy version of Donkey Kong, also sometimes referred to as “Donkey Kong ’94”. I talked about it more last time I played it, which I thought was maybe three years ago but it turns out it was FOURTEEN years ago. Cripes.

This time, I played it on the Switch’s Game Boy game service thingy, but it’s just the same game as it ever was before. It’s still really slick, and plays well to the Game Boy’s limitations.

Emio – The Smiling Man: Famicom Detective Club (Switch): COMPLETED!

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This Famicom Detective Club game differs from the others in a number of ways. Firstly, for some reason, “Famicom Detective Club” is now the subtitle rather than the title. Secondly, there are a few tweaks to the dialogue system (which I’ll explain in a bit), but the big one is that this isn’t a remake of a 40 year old Famicom title – it’s a completely new game in the series, with the murder mystery story written by the same person as those games were all that time ago.

This time round, you’re needed to investigate the creepy case of a child has seemingly been murdered by a man wearing a paper bag with a face drawn on it, and is actually quite scary. As you uncover more, you find that it would appear to be linked to a series of murders from about 18 years prior (which, coincidentally, your boss investigated at the time) as well as the disappearance of two people, one of whom is the brother of the police officer assigned to the current case. It’s all a bit twisty and it’s really good.

Although it obviously uses the same game engine as the other two games, this one is improved a bit. The biggest change is the (optional) highlighting of words in your conversations that may link to questions or actions you can choose from the menu, and provide new information. This gets rid of most of the press-everything-until-the-right-thing-happens issue from the other games, although it isn’t a complete fix. Still, a massive improvement.

I can’t say much more about the game as it’ll ruin it for anyone who is going to play it, but it is much darker in tone than the first two titles, which weren’t exactly light to start with. If you like murder mysteries, this is an essential play.

Blue Prince (PS5): COMPLETED!

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So what if dominoes was an art deco dungeon crawling roguelike deck-building puzzle game?

You’ve inherited a fortune from your great uncle, but only if you’re able to reach room 46 of his 45 room house. Getting to the room involves solving logic and cryptic puzzles, realising that random items in each room might actually be important clues, and putting together hidden messages and objects to understand your family’s past and the reason the house is so weird.

The weirdness of the house comes about from the fact that each day, it is emptied of all the rooms. Each door you open requires you to draft the room that will appear on the other side of it, and you can choose from three randomly chosen rooms from a larger deck each time.

Rooms have different purposes, with different door layouts, so it’s possible to dead-end yourself and that’s where the roguelike bit of the game comes in – you call it a day and start afresh tomorrow. The house layout resets, you lose all the items you’ve collected, and you give it another go. You can also end a day if you run out of steps – you only start with so many and each room you enter (or re-enter, so backtracking is penalised) uses one up. Food you find and sometimes drafting bedrooms can boost your number of steps, though.

As you play, you find a few things which do persist between days, like being able to start with some money – which you can use to buy things in some rooms – or gems – which you mainly use to draft rarer or more powerful rooms. You can also open up permanent shortcuts and boons, and start with more steps.

I’ve seen a lot of people complaining that you’re at the mercy of the random number generator in order to progress, but that’s no different to Rogue, really. Most runs have you finding something new, like a bit of story, a secret, a clue, a new room in your room pool or a permanent bonus of some kind so even failed runs usually have some progression. For example, you may find a safe combination but then fail to get the room with the safe in it on the same run, but your knowledge of the combination carries over.

It’s smart, weird, occasionally cruel, but always intriguing. And who wouldn’t want to explore a reassembling, randomly generated family mansion full of secrets and puzzles, one failed day at a time?

Natsu-Mon: 20th Century Summer Kid (Switch): COMPLETED!

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Remember a while back I played a game called Shin Chan The Endless Subtitle About Seven Days Of Summer Or Something? It’s one of those lazy Japanese summer games by Kaz Ayabe where you go fishing and catch bugs and do lots of minor things with very little consequence. Natsu-Mon is one of them.

This time you’re a boy who’s part of a circus troupe, staying at a guest house in a small town for the summer. You run errands for everyone, solve some mysteries, catch and raise pigs, and collect shells, gems and litter to sell so you can buy things to help out—like an acorn shooter to stun bugs and daze pigeons and seagulls. Dazing birds does nothing, incidentally. It’s just cruel. I did it a lot.

After a few days the circus is ready to go and you become the planner for the acts, which mostly means picking the order of the performances and choosing the clothes the performers wear. The acts are terrible to begin with and the crowd is unimpressed, but you can buy better, fancier equipment and your audience starts to grow. Not that it matters. Nothing you do really matters. You can ignore the circus completely. Or the pigs. Or the entire town.

Regardless of what you do or how well you do it, at the end of August the game ends and you leave the town. There’s no good or bad ending. Just the memories you made along the way.

It plays just like Ayabe’s other games, only this one is full 3D with a free camera, unlike the others which have fixed camera angles like the original Resident Evil. One of the issues I had with the Doraemon game, and I mentioned it at the time, was that the fixed camera made navigation really confusing. You’d leave the screen heading right and enter the next one from the bottom, or something equally disorienting. This new Breath of the Wild-style camera fixes that and makes exploring the town and surrounding area much easier. The actual world is much bigger this time too, and it even borrows ideas from Breath of the Wild—there’s upgradable stamina you use for running and climbing, and a “Tengu’s Cape” which is basically the paraglider from that game.

The problem is, all this new full 3D big-world-ness really makes the Switch struggle. And that’s weird, because Breath of the Wild is absolutely massive and far more complex and detailed than this, which frankly looks like a GameCube game. Yet the framerate in this crawls into single digits far too often. There also seems to be a memory leak or something because performance gets worse the longer you play. Save, quit and reload, and it’s fine again for a bit, but after another couple of hours it starts to nosedive again.

Despite all that, it’s a lovely, relaxing game with no peril, lovely sunsets, and a cast of silly characters. Just like all the others. Oh yeah, and toilets are used as teleporters. Nice.