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Category: Every Game I’ve Finished
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Paranormasight: The Seven Mysteries of Honjo (Xeen, 2023)
Developed/Published by: Xeen / Square Enix
Released: 08/03/2023
Completed: 17/10/2026
Completion: Got all the endings!A new Paranormasight game came out earlier this year, but I’d missed the first game in the series. As eager as I was to play it, I thought it’d be best to wait until the season was right. And so I did!
To be completely honest, it probably wasn’t necessary. While Paranormasight is spooky, the creepy moments and jump-scares are very front-loaded; the rest of the game settles into more of the “mystery novel” milieu, as characters cross paths and work in tandem (intentionally or not) to stop a forthcoming tragedy, and ultimately “solve” the seven mysteries of Honjo. I suppose it was in the title…
This isn’t bad (at all!) and horror films and stories are often procedurals, but I was surprised by how much the game lets off the gas after its dark and creepy prologue. But it’s probably because Paranormasight is very dense: there are a lot of characters to keep track of, several murders to try to connect, deep lore to parse, and timelines to line up. The game is thinky, not spooky.
In Paranormasight, you play four different characters in 1980s Tokyo. The game’s prologue features Shogo Okiie, a fairly normal guy who’s ended up looking into the seven mysteries to impress a girl. After that, you can move largely at will between three other protagonists: Harue Shigima, a housewife anguished by the loss of her son, who believes the seven mysteries may be able to resurrect him. Yakko Sakazaki, who is using the paranormal to investigate the death of a classmate. And Tetsu Tsusumi, a hard-boiled detective investigating the murders that are occurring due to the curses that are connected with the seven mysteries.
Although generally described as a visual novel, Paranormasight is very much on the side of the genre that errs towards its roots in Japanese adventure games. While it features timeline jumping–which I tend to think of as a visual novel design “thing”–the meat of the game is instead in the patient exhaustion of options that you see in Japanese adventures, where you might have to talk to someone three or four times to get everything out of them, and maybe even go off, do something else and then return to them to actually progress.
The Phoenix Wright games are probably the most popular example of this, though Paranormasight has one really nice, player-focused change: as soon as you’ve exhausted an option you get a wee tick beside it, so you know there’s no point still doing it–and if there isn’t a tick, and you’re getting the same response repeatedly, you’ll know you’ve got to do something else and come back to exhaust the option.
I can understand why certain visual novel fans might find this a bit annoying in Paranormasight. In a lot of the game you’re not really performing any particular lateral thinking to move the story forward–while the game does have a few things like inventory puzzles, as is fairly normal for Japanese adventures they’re used very sparingly compared to their western equivalents–you’re mostly just doing things like talking to one character four times, then another character in the same room a couple of times, then going back to the first character to complete the scene.
Luckily, Paranormasight’s world and characters are extremely engaging from the off. The team have worked really hard to make the game embody 1980s Japan, and I love that it’s not just obvious signifiers like rotary telephones, but that a “bad girl” character has a proper sukeban blowout hairstyle, or private detective Richter Kai’s shōjo manga good looks (like he’d stepped off the pages of Aim For The Ace.)
The problem is that the characters and world can only take the game so far. They’re supporting a story that is largely entertainingly complex and twisty, but there’s so much to it that it slows down significantly after the exciting, pacey prologue, and comes to a dead stop at the climax. Paranormasight ends with an extremely hard puzzle that requires you pour over the files and make connections that aren’t really very obvious–imagine a thriller where the climax is the heroes popping down the reference library for a few hours–and when you finally work that out (or just look it up) the concluding puzzle requires you remember something that happened basically at the start of the game (which you could have missed) and then do an action that you haven’t had to do anywhere else.
It’s unfortunately very deflating, and it’s made worse that the climax makes everything you did feel bizarrely pointless. Without giving too much away, visual novel timeline shenanigans can too often lean heavily on “what if?” and in Paranormasight this decision makes when and where you can jump–and who you can and can’t save–feel kind of arbitrary. It’s really not helped that the game’s villains largely work behind the scenes, leading to a frankly unsatisfying denouement.
This probably sounds like I’m really down on Paranormasight, but I’m not. Well, not entirely, anyway. It’s simply that the game starts so strongly that it can’t maintain the high. You can feel them put all their best ideas into the start–there’s one meta element that while hardly ground breaking, is so amusing and clever that it did make me laugh out loud–and they end up with nowhere to go from there. I’d still largely recommend it, but it’s a real “it’s the journey, not the destination” kind of game: more for people who love figuring out a complicated mystery rather than those looking for a breezy spook-a-thon.
Will I ever play it again? No, but I’m excited to play The Mermaid’s Curse and see what they’ve learned.
Final Thought: One really lovely (and funny) thing about Paranormasight: it’s set in Sumida City, Tokyo and goes out of its way to represent the area realistically, being made with “the full support and cooperation of Sumida City Tourism Division, the local museum, the tourist association, and the local community.” I genuinely love that the tourism division was like “your game is about how our city is cursed, and that people get murdered here? Sign us up!”
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The Evil Dead (Palace Software, 1984)
Developed/Published by: Richard Leinfellner, Colin Tanner / Palace Software
Released: 1984
Completed: 06/10/2026
Completion: 11,000 on BBC Micro, 28,700 on C64. I could do better on the C64 at least.Halloween is so connected with scary movies to me that I can’t help but dig out licensed horror games to play for our now yearly spooktacular, and it’s interesting how surprising all the early licenses have been. Poltergeist… exclusive to TRS-80? Charles Band putting out Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Halloween on the Atari 2600? But nothing could initially seem stranger than Sam Raimi’s legendary The Evil Dead, a notably independent film, somehow getting a computer game released for the BBC Micro and C64 (well, and ZX Spectrum, but there’s a quirk to that we’ll get to.)
But it all comes down to the era. The early 80s was not just a period of growth for home computers but all forms of home electronics, and for many, that meant VHS players. In the UK, due the British Board of Film Classification’s lack of foresight, films distributed on video were in a grey area when it came to the otherwise stringent rules—meaning distributors releasing films only on video would often just not bother submitting them for review and rating. So the video store of the 1980s was a wild west of unregulated content. Although a slightly chaste wild west, as pornography in any form was obviously covered by the obscene publications act, and that was still taken very seriously. That means that for people with a VHS player looking for easily accessible kicks, horror was the way to go.
And therefore The Evil Dead was very much there at the right place and right time… and simultaneously, the wrong place at the wrong time. Screened at the Cannes Film Festival out of competition, the press caught the eye of Stephen Woolley, the owner of Palace Pictures. Palace Pictures was set up originally to distribute cult cinema, releasing things like David Lynch’s Eraserhead on video, and it was a legitimate outfit, getting The Evil Dead a theatrical release in the UK, meaning it was reviewed by the BBFC and had 49 seconds cut.
The problem arose when it was released on video and became a huge success (reportedly the best selling VHS of the year) as it got caught up in the raging “video nasty” culture war. Essentially, boring old biddies decided that they could probably use the vaguely-written obscene publication act to get things which weren’t actively pornographic banned for their “corrupting” influence. In fact, legendary boring old biddy Mary Whitehouse reportedly called it the “number one nasty.” (Though I suppose she might have been referring to the sales figures.)
As a result, The Evil Dead would end up on a list drawn up by the Director of Public Prosecutions as a video where you could be fined or literally jailed for distributing it. Except… the list was kind of hopeful, and while across the country distributors just pled guilty rather than face a costly legal case, when Palace Pictures were taken to Snaresbrook Crown Court over releasing the film, they successfully defended the film from the obscenity charges, removing the film from the DPP video nasties list (in fact, Palace would make a point of re-releasing the tape with a big “Not Guilty!” banner.) That all sounds good, but all that meant was the film was put in a category where (insanely) it was still subject to confiscation if the local police felt like it (I am not joking about this) even though the person distributing it couldn’t be charged.
This ridiculous mess would all be sorted out by the UK finally creating the Video Recording Act 1984 to actually make the rules less vibes-based (well, all censorship is ultimately vibes-based, but in a more regulated fashion). It wasn’t signed into law until September 1985 at which point it The Evil Dead was, perhaps ironically, de facto “banned” because the BBFC just didn’t get around to classifying it (seemingly stymied by the fact that even if the film had been successfully defended in one court, other courts had distributors “admitting” it was obscene.) The film wouldn’t be released on video in the UK again until 1990, with over a minute of extra cuts.1
Anyway, it’s in all of this madness that Palace Pictures founded Palace Software, judging that home computer games were as good a bet as VHS. And then, I think, surmising that if they could knock out a game based on The Evil Dead, well, they could create a revenue stream that wouldn’t lead to as many (or any) confiscations.
The Evil Dead seems to be mostly talked about online as a Commodore 64 game, because of the system’s international popularity, and for the fact that the ZX Spectrum version was only released as a backup “b-side” to Palace Software’s later game Cauldron. But it does look at least possible that the original version of the game was the BBC Micro version. It’s the only version of the game that comes with a proper introduction and it very pointedly states “written by Colin Tanner” whereas the C64 version says “C64 version by Richard Leinfellner2.”
I can’t call that definitive, however. In a interview with The Evil Dead fansite Book Of The Dead Leinfellner says:
“My old boss and I watched [The Evil Dead] in fast forward eating pizza at his house. I thought it was quite funny and we came up with the simple design there and then.”
However, if you ask for “further instruction” on the game’s title screen in the BBC Micro version, it ends with a note from Tanner, where he says:
“Before you start, I would like to thank Christopher Pratt and Phillip Smith who helped me design the game.”
It seems possible that Palace Software’s Pete Stone and Leinfellner came up with the basic idea and it’s Tanner who actually put it together for the first time, and I lean towards that being the case due to some interesting differences between the ports.
(Palace Software, actually, had a very strange aspect to their The Evil Dead release, in that each copy, rather than having useful stuff like “how to play” on the tape inlay, had a long biography of the programmer, with both Tanner and Leinfellner getting their star turn. It’s a shame they couldn’t have used that space to clear this up…)
Whoever designed The Evil Dead, I’ll give them this: it’s a good idea. It’s a noble attempt to recreate the film as a game rather than just slapping the IP on any old rubbish. But it just doesn’t work.
The Evil Dead wants to be a siege defence game. Does this genre have a specific name, actually? I’m not talking about tower defence (although it could be a subgenre of that.) I’m not talking about games where you drop turrets or traps, but games where you’re simply holed up in a home trying to keep the windows and doors blocked and attacking anyone who gets in–trying to avoid being overwhelmed. The closest comparison I can make is the (superb) Cephalopods Co-op Cottage Defence by Spooky Squid Games, where one player has a hammer, trying to keep the cottage secure, and the other has a gun, to kill the enemies that breach (god, it’s so good. Shame it was never expanded on.)
In The Evil Dead, you play Ash3 at a cabin with your pals. From a top-down perspective, your goal is to keep your companions safe, by closing the doors and windows, and arming yourself with weapons that spawn randomly. On the C64 version there’s an evil spirit visualised by a cloud that can get in through any openings. If it touches you, you die. If it touches one of your companions, they turn into a mutant, who you then have to dismember–and then you have to kill their dismembered body parts. On the BBC Micro, the spirt isn’t embodied in anyway, but it doesn’t make much difference.
Once all your companions are dead, they all respawn and it starts again, with the idea being that if you can get to 100,000 points the book of the dead will spawn and you can chuck it in the fireplace to win the game.
Honestly, this sounds great. But it is hampered by the hardware and general ineptitude. The cabin map is simple and horribly cramped: Ash is as wide as the doors and the collision is strict, meaning a lot of time is spent wobbling around trying to fit through. The other characters have no intelligence, so they love to open doors and run outside, or all clump up in the hallway blocking your movement. There’s no feedback/animation for attacks, so you’ve really got no idea if you’re even really doing anything (I think the idea is that you take less damage when you’ve got a weapon on hand.)
Strangely, the C64 version has better looking characters but a much worse looking home than on the BBC Micro. I think it’s been done to make more space for the idiotic characters to bumble around in, but the ugly beds and the loss of the dining table really hurt the already weak ambience.
The question of the game’s true authorship matters when it comes to the intended scoring system, because they’re wildly different and completely change the goals of the game. In fact, it’s the main reason why I lean towards Tanner being the game’s true designer. In the BBC Micro version, you don’t score for killing enemies, because it only makes sense that when enemies appear you’ve actually failed. You only score for closing windows4, which makes the game seem even more mundane than it is.
In the C64 version, you score for closing windows, but much less than you do for killing enemies. As in both versions the goal is a high score, what you actually want to do is let the evil spirit in so you can kill your companions and try and rack up the score as quickly as possible–but this is hampered by the fact that the evil spirit is as stupid as everyone else, and often gets itself caught behind the swing on the porch.
In both versions Ash’s health is constantly dropping, though, so I don’t know if you can actually reach the high score via any method. The C64 version is more playable, but it’s not really a siege defense game, but an “unfortunate companion farming sim”?
As for the ZX Spectrum version, I didn’t bother with it, because it seems to be exactly the same as the C64 and didn’t get a “proper” release. The Evil Dead reviewed weirdly positively on C64, but Chris Neary, the C64 version’s graphic artist has said that Leinfellner had told him it had only sold 5000 copies. It seems that Palace Software had issues getting The Evil Dead stocked considering the video nasty pedigree, and the C64 version certainly sells for such high prices in the collectors’ market now that even 5000 sounds like a lot. If the Spectrum port had come in late, it wouldn’t have been worth the cost of duplication and distribution, so simply better to bundle it as a bonus with Cauldron (which was originally planned to be the second game based on Halloween!)
The Evil Dead is an interestingly strange little bit of history–a neat bit of trivia–but that’s about all it is. It certainly isn’t scary (it’s not even violent!) I’ll give some props to Colin Tanner… or Richard Leinfellner? for trying something, though.
Will I ever play it again? No. And sadly Colin Tanner didn’t seem to make anything else, so if it was him who created this, he didn’t get a chance at making The Evil Dead for a second time but as a comedy.
Final Thought: The Evil Dead was a wet squib, and Palace Software would give up on making a Halloween game, which might make you think they weren’t trying to court controversy with either, but the release of Barbarian makes it pretty clear they were looking for at least a bit of profitable notoriety. Because Barbarian hit it big, getting banned in Germany for featuring decapitations and taking marketing further than ever before with the help of a model called Maria Whittaker. You can read all about that over at the reliably excellent Super Chart Island.
- Thanks to the BBFC for writing a case study on this and Book of The Dead for still hosting it. ↩︎
- Leinfellner was originally a sales assistant at “The Video Palace” another arm of Palace, and formed Palace Software with manager Pete Stone. ↩︎
- This is spelled “Ashly” on the C64 and there’s a BBC Micro screenshot on Mobygames where it is similarly misspelled, but it’s spelled correctly in the version you can download/play online at the complete BBC Micro Games Archive. Possibly it was corrected for the version on Beau Jolly’s “10 Computer Hits 2” compilation? ↩︎
- Yes, only windows, not doors for some reason. ↩︎
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The Exit 8 (Kotake Create, 2023) / Exit 8 (2025)
The Exit 8 (Kotake Create, 2023)
Developed/Published by: Kotake Create / Playism
Released: 29/11/2023
Completed: 26/09/2026
Completion: Finished it!It’s October, which it means it’s time for spooky games. Which is a great excuse to finally play The Exit 8 (yes, that’s its official title). I watched Backrooms back in July having not previously engaged with the liminal space horror genre before and I… well, I found it underwhelming to the point I couldn’t be bothered to give it a proper review on Letterboxd. I found the parts of the movie that were the most “video gamey” the most interesting though: the idea of this “level” to explore. Mapping it out. The unknown threats. And then I found all the “this is a movie, not a ‘Let’s Play’” stuff really… cringe? Probably because, like everyone, I’m tired of every horror movie being about trauma.
I am pleased to say that neither The Exit 8, nor its cinema adaptation, are about trauma!
To be honest, The Exit 8 isn’t really about anything. It’s a game of pure sensation. When you describe it, it doesn’t really sound like anything. You’re trapped in a Japanese subway station corridor. If there’s something in the corridor that looks different, or something odd is happening (an “anomaly”) you should turn back. If there isn’t–move forwards. If you can manage to do this 8 times in a row, as in make your way forwards/backwards through eight different corridors, you win.
It sounds like… first-person spot the difference. And I guess, mostly, it is. But The Exit 8 is a great example of the one night game–you know, a game that you pick up and you play through in one evening (or any time of day you can set aside.) I last experienced this with Many Nights A Whisper, last year’s exp. GOTY, and while The Exit 8 isn’t quite to that level, it’s similarly deserving of your complete focus in one playthrough.
In fact, I don’t think it would work as well if you put it down and came back to it. I started The Exit 8 a little too late (should really have been in bed) and it was perfect, because I felt trapped. I was trapped in this corridor and couldn’t go to bed until I left it. The Exit 8 isn’t forgiving. If you make a single mistake, you have to start again right from the beginning. Because the game is so short, it wouldn’t work any other way (for what it’s worth, I finished it in an hour, but a “perfect” playthrough would be a handful of minutes.) Each time you miss something, you’re crushed–and you’re confused and annoyed with yourself. “What did I miss?” you’ll ask yourself. “I checked everywhere!” you’ll think, unable to bargain with the game–and you can’t even go back and check.
The Exit 8 is interesting, because it’s not particularly scary. It is, however, excellently unnerving. There will be several moments where you turn the corner and immediately nope out of there because of what you’ve seen; other moments where you push a little forward, knowing it’s an anomaly, but needing to satisfy some curiosity. It’s a classic sort of haunted house, really–you choose to frighten yourself.
The Exit 8 isn’t exactly horror–so it’s perhaps not the perfect way to kick off October (no draculas or wolfmen here!) but it’s a brilliant way to spend an hour. With the right parameters, it’s immediate and visceral in a way that it feels only games can be.
Exit 8 (2025)
But of course, they made a movie of it! Dropping the “The” no one usually notices it’s a savvy adaptation of the game layering story on where there isn’t one (and not even making it about trauma). It cleverly opens in first person, making you think it might be a completely straight adaptation–as an unnamed protagonist, having just received news that his ex is pregnant, suddenly finds himself in the corridors of Exit 8–but as soon as he’s in the corridors the camera pulls back and we get a more traditionally shot film.
What’s interesting about that, though, is that it really pulls into stark relief the difference between movies and games. I just saw Resident Evil, Zach Cregger’s take on the legendary franchise, and one of the things I liked about it was how inspired it was by the actual form of video games rather than just the narrative: the forward momentum, the hero’s progression via increasingly powerful weapons. But even with that, you could never say to yourself “oh, it was like I was playing the game.”1
In Exit 8, you kind of feel like you are playing the game. Because The Exit is “just” spot-the-difference, right? And so when you’re watching Exit 8, and you catch the anomalies, it’s kind of got the same pleasure as in the game. When the hero ends up back at zero, it’s a gut punch, almost the same.
But it’s not the same. There’s an authored gaze, and every anomaly you “spot” is served, from the very first one. The focus, the movement of the camera, the positioning on screen. You’re being played, not the other way around.
It’s a movie that invites an active viewer, but I admit that I kept waiting for the anomaly that wasn’t shown to me, that I had to truly catch myself, that never showed up.
In The Exit 8, you’re on your own. If you miss something, you’ll never know what it was. If you don’t move forward, the game will never end. It’s funny to say that experiencing game and film back to back had me feeling pandered to simply by the nature of cinema. “Pfft, it shows me what I need to know? It plays itself? Christ, baby much?”
Exit 8 does, however, do a great job imbuing the setting with meaning–even shifting viewpoints to do so. I was surprised by how moving I found a segment that (in the game) feels like a throwaway The Shining riff, for example. The Exit 8 in becoming Exit 8 becomes a story not about just observation but engagement: truly engaging with the world around you. It’s not about seeing the right thing, but doing the right thing, when it matters, and living up to the potential of what you can be.
This is enriching in retrospect to The Exit 8, and I did wonder–would this have worked if it was there to begin with? Funnily enough, no. Ironically, the moments of struggle and catharsis must be out of our hands. We can’t learn about ourselves what the protagonist of Exit 8 does to do the thing he chooses to do, and it always sucks when they make those moments a cut-scene. Exit 8 only works as a movie the way The Exit 8 only works as a game. One with full control, one with none. One where you embody the struggle to escape, one where you empathise with it.
Both The Exit 8 and Exit 8 are great–and they work perfectly one after the other; in fact, I’d say it’s the only way to do it. Play first, though. You’d spoil the game in a way that you can’t spoil the movie playing them out of order.
Will I ever play it again? Not sure if I’ll give Platform 8 a shot or not. I know it’s short, but I appreciated this experience so much that I kind of want it to be singular, you know? Er, even though it involved two different forms of media. So a… plural experience?
Final Thought: The Exit 8 is particularly fun if you’ve visited Japan and have any experience of Japanese train stations, because you’ve almost certainly: got lost in them, and have a fondness for them anyway. I appreciate that what starts as a “oh, it’s just like I’m there” quickly becomes “I’ve got to get out of here!”
- Something I think that’s interesting–but don’t really have a place for–is that both Exit 8 and Resident Evil are based on video games, and both are concerned with the anxiety of “growing up”, in fact having protagonists with the exact same dilemma (an unexpected baby on the way.) To prod at the anxieties of an audience in a permanent adolescence feels savvy in a way that Backrooms’ ironically backwards-looking tropes don’t, and I wonder if we’ll see a sea change in horror themes to fears for our future (considering… everything) rather than attempting to suppress our past. ↩︎
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Dragon Quest Heroes: Torneko’s Mystery Dungeon -Classic HD- (Square Enix, 2026)
Developed/Published by: Square Enix
Released: 09/09/2026
Completed: 15/09/2026
Completion: Returned to the surface with the Chest of Cheer!On the 9th September I stuck on the Nintendo Direct, which isn’t something I always do (if I remember I’ll put it on in the background) and one thing caught my eye: a re-release of Torneko’s Mystery Dungeon, the first game in Chunsoft’s beloved Mystery Dungeon franchise. Chunsoft has their own original IP for the franchise, Shiren The Wanderer, and the series has also seen instalments in the Final Fantasy and Pokemon franchises… in fact even the Etrian Odyssey and The Tower of Druaga franchises! It’s a game design that’s got legs, obviously, having been directly inspired by Rogue (so a true Roguelike) but it all started here.
I’m not sure why I got so particularly excited by this that I picked it up on the same day. I mean I’ve got Shiren the Wanderer for DS and I’ve never finished it, along with countless other Roguelike and Roguelike-likes either abandoned or on the docket. Maybe I was just looking for the excuse to be excited about something, and, honestly, as you know by now, I love starting franchises at the beginning, and with no official release of Torneko’s Mystery Dungeon until now…
And yet, I’ve really struggled with if I should write about this one. Shortly after its release–and after I’d played it for at least six hours–John Harris posted a new instalment of his @play Roguelike article where he provided a lot of tips that will be particularly helpful to people playing any version of Torneko’s Mystery Dungeon for the first time, but also noted:
“I note that the credits to this game have a section for AI content. I don’t think that necessarily means it was used to make this game.”
This, obviously, made me pause. It was hardly conclusive (though I did post about it on Bluesky to let people know) so I had to decide: do I keep playing this version, which I was already finding a bit flawed? Or was that just a sunk cost fallacy?
I looked for the game credits to see if I could confirm the information. But.
You can’t see the credits unless you finish the game–which in this case, means trekking down to the 27th floor, getting the “Chest of Cheer” and trekking back up. And this is a Roguelike. And I’ve never beaten Shiren the Wanderer, so…
Well, you know I had to do it to ‘em. There weren’t any long play videos online to look up to try and see the credits, so I just thought–let’s do it.
I’ll say this. Torneko’s Mystery Dungeon is a good “first” proper Roguelike, because while it’s not easy–in fact, it absolutely doesn’t help the player in any way, when it says randomly generated, it means it–the game has less stuff in it than a lot of later games, meaning that there’s only so much you need to know. And it’s a true Roguelike, in that if you get lucky, you can finish it on your first go–there’s absolutely no requirement here that you grind up unlocks to get to the point where you can actually finish it. It’s random, but it’s “fair.”
So I got a bit lucky and was able to finish Torneko’s Mystery Dungeon, an extremely satisfying thing to do. And then there it was. The entire segment of the credits that credited the people that worked on “AI and Engine Development.”
I have to say… it’s not looking good. The obvious rationalisation you might want to make is “well, when they say AI, they might mean enemy AI.” But Torneko’s Mystery Dungeon is a Roguelike, and it’s a very simple one, where every enemy apart from a few (that move randomly) just move directly towards Torneko by the quickest route they can manage. Even characters that, say, steal from Torneko and then flee seem to just be moving randomly unless they are a square or two away from Torneko, at which point they flee again.
I could program this, and I’m not even a coder. No team is required. And that it says “AI and Engine Development” implies–or at least, I am inferring–that AI was involved in creating the engine for this HD remake.
Now, does that mean that this is a complete vibe coded botch job? Well, not absolutely. But as many people including Harris have pointed out, the version launched had some frustrating issues, with laggy inputs and frustratingly slow, unskippable dialogue boxes in battles, which smell a bit… vibey.1
I approached Square Enix for comment and (unsurprisingly) got nothing, so I can’t say for sure. However, the thing about Torneko’s Mystery Dungeon is that it’s a great, great game, and even if the HD remake wasn’t vibe coded, it’s really not the best way to play it.
To review this version: It’s fine. The new 2.5D style is hardly HD2D (although I know everyone is getting sick of that style by now) really just replicating the original simple graphics but a bit 3D, and that’s… about it for actual differences. Otherwise it’s just the same, so really all you’re getting is the graphics tilted slightly and a bit of a lighting effect. The game’s major addition is the “Streaming Up a Storm: My Dungeon, Your Rules (β)” DLC which adds audience participation if you’re streaming the game–I love the idea, but haven’t tried it and wouldn’t call it a major selling point.
If you don’t want to stream the game, the best way to play the game is almost certainly going to be the original version. If you’re willing to put up with Japanese, you can pick up a cart only copy of the game for less than this new HD version goes for, and there’s a fan translation available. The only thing you might miss from the remake is the cute papercraft intro, but you can look that up online so you’re fine.
There really is no reason to not play the version that looks like this. To be honest, Torneko’s Mystery Dungeon -Classic HD- is a bit of a sad situation. This is a truly fucking great game, and you should want to support it, considering there are two more Torneko sequels out there that it’d be cool to see out there in English. But, frankly, not like this. It’s a no-win situation. You buy this version and support it and Square Enix think: well, slopping out a crappy port is all we need to do! And you don’t support it and they think: making old games available isn’t worth our time.
When all they really need to do was to show a tiny bit of care.
So we’re back at square [“Enix?”–Ed.] one, really: no one is going to care for game history but us. Keep circulating the tapes.
Will I ever play it again? Unless Square Enix get back to me and unequivocally state they didn’t touch AI while developing this, no, never. As much as when this was released I got stars in my eyes imagining my new career streaming this.
Final Thought: And for everything that I’ve said, I really do want to state: Torneko’s Mystery Dungeon is a great introduction to true Roguelikes. It’s very manageable and you can learn the game’s techniques as you go and understand why it’s so captivating. I was reminded how great these games are at creating diegetic stories. My very first game where I was 19 floors deep(!) found myself in a monster den, read the scroll of sanctuary that would have saved me (because I didn’t grasp I needed to just drop it) and immediately died. The following game where I didn’t find a weapon for 13 levels, arrived in a monster den, cast bang twice, killed everyone, excitedly moved towards a weapon and… fell through the floor. Or my winning run, where I had to resort to throwing herbs at dragons just to get past them, and then the terrifying climb back up through the dangerous levels I’d just experienced with almost no items to hand. Thank god for the sustaining ring. If you know, you know.
- There has since been a patch, but this came in just after I finished the game, annoyingly. I can’t speak to how much the game has been improved or not. ↩︎
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Mouse: P.I. For Hire (Fumi Games, 2026)
Developed/Published by: Fumi Games / Playside Studio
Released: 16/04/2026
Completed: 08/09/2026
Completion: Finished it.Quake was in the news recently, what with it being the 30th Anniversary and that, and seeing all that hot Quake action got me in the mood to play a shooter of the boomer persuasion. I considered revisiting Quake, but to be honest, I was never that hot on it. I’ve always preferred my shooters to have more of a sense of place (I was more of a Duke Nukem 3D guy when it came to level design.) So nosing around I remembered Mouse: P.I. For Hire had come out this year, and thought I’d give it a shot, considering the obvious effort put into the world.
Really wish I’d played Quake, to be honest. I’m beginning to realise that my intention with this site–to generally try and write about indies when I’m not writing about retro–isn’t doing me any favours. That’s three new games in a row now that I found initially interesting but which ground me down into despair. I said it with Denshattack, but developers, please, dear god, less is more. I was surprised to discover that I’d played this for “only” just over thirteen hours, because it felt endless. Really much like Denshattack, Mouse: P.I. For Hire would have been an entertaining trifle at half (or hopefully less) the time. I don’t give scores, but if I did, I could feel the score tick down as the hours went by. “Well, you know, it’s a solid six, almost a seven but it didn’t quite have the spark…. Ach, it’s a five, there really isn’t that much to it… four, I’m not sure what I saw in it to begin with…”
I think much like Denshattack, what makes writing these articles seems sort of bitter and counterproductive, considering I’d really like the games industry to survive (to the point where it could rehire me???) is that I can see that this was a game with a lot of love and effort lavished on it. But it’s also, simply, unsuccessful at what it’s trying to do.
First up: it’s a take on a noir. Good! It’s a fun genre, there are lots of tropes to pull from, and you don’t have to reinvent the wheel. But I’m going to explain something and I think it’s going to make really clear how wrong Mouse P.I. get it.
In my playthrough, it took four and a half hours for the femme fatale to show up.
After playing this, I saw that Game Developer’s Bryant Francis had written up a pretty nice analysis of the game’s narrative, and it reflects a studio that was just trying to cram everything in that they loved, every idea that they had, but as a result they ended up with, well, a mess. I suppose it’s (sort of) funny that at the end of the game the clue board you’ve been building is a Pepe Silvia that you can’t parse, but there absolutely came a point where I stopped following the narrative because much like Denshattack (again) it felt like all plot and no character (once the femme fatale shows up she just… stands around in your office, for example.) I appreciate, as Francis does, that the game is trying to make big swings; but I was already bored by the time I was killing demons in hell with a cartoon chainsaw and absolutely thinking “why am I doing any of this?”
(Francis is far more charitable than me in general, but I particularly agree with him highlighting the messy use of “fantastic racism” via the treatment of shrews as second-class citizens to mice. It’s something that I really cringed at—it is rough when the voodoo priestess shows up—and which I suspect speaks to the limits of experience of the team.)
The weighting of the team’s priorities just seems wildly out of wack. There’s so much narrative, and the game generally looks great, but the core shooting play feels almost vestigial despite being the main way you interact with the world. There are what feels like four enemy types (normal guys that shoot at you, wee guys that run at you, big bullet sponges that run at you, and wee guys that fly and shoot at you) with minor variations, and every encounter is just “run around in a small arena trying not to get trapped or hitscanned to death using whatever your strongest weapon is.”
The game hands out weapons on a glacially slow pace and the weapons it does hand out don’t offer much in the way of variety. Once you’ve unlocked the “devarnisher” (sort of a grenade launcher) and the James gun (a machine gun, and I see what they did there) there’s really no reason to switch unless you’re out of ammo, because most everything else is underwhelming (the shotguns, in particular, feel slow and totally underpowered, even when upgraded.)
It’s like they’ve missed what the point of a variety of enemies and weapons are: the combinations are supposed to create interesting encounters! There’s no sense here that enemies synergise either with other enemies or the level designs, and if there is a reason to set enemies on fire or whatever outside of just trying to do raw damage I don’t see it. Once you’ve played the first couple of levels, there’s really no more to it, outside of (frankly) annoying, bullet-sponge bosses with phases that just seem to drag on and on.
There’s a lot of “well, this is a thing games have in it” here, really. A perfect example is that throughout the game the hero unlocks new traversal abilities. All the usual Metroidvaniaey things: double jump, wall run, that sort of thing. Remember how everyone loved the wallrun in Titanfall 2? Well, here it shows up late in the game, and you can use it on specifically marked wallrun panels, which are rare.
Indeed, none of these abilities are there to–for example–open up new areas in levels you’ve previously been to (the classic reason you do this) and nor do they really show up much after they’ve been introduced (in fact, you’ll definitely forget some of them, like being able to float.) The levels are pretty and they’ve got a great sense of place, but it’s naive game design: you’ve put the things in you think games need, without interrogating if your game needs it, and then once it’s there, you don’t even really do anything with it!
Mouse P.I. is a facade, and I mean that in the architectural sense: if you look at it straight on, it looks amazing, but if you even slightly investigate it, you can see there’s nothing behind it and it’s just being held up with some wonky support beams. I don’t doubt that this team could create something incredible, but I think they’d need to drill further down on what they actually like when playing games and make that. It’s so easy to get tied up in the thing you’re making than the thing you would actually want to make. A little more focus, a little stronger authorial, design-minded vision, a little harder on the edit… they’ve probably got something.
Will I ever play it again? They’re doing DLC, and hopefully they’ll have had some time to think about what worked and what didn’t with Mouse P.I., but I’m good.
Final Thought: I suppose if I was looking for some modern-but-not-modern Quakey fun maybe I should have waited for Sprawl Zero. Looking at that, however, will have to wait, because I excitedly downloaded Torneko’s Mystery Dungeon HD as soon as it came out like a huge idiot and have spent far too long playing that.
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Wanted! Monty Mole (Harrap, 1984)
Developed/Published by: Peter Harrap / Gremlin Graphics
Released: 29/07/1984
Completed: 07/09/2026
Completion: Got to the end, having let myself save pretty liberally at screen transitions, and… somehow hadn’t collected all the coal so couldn’t actually finish it. Well, close enough!The Monty Mole franchise is a classic British franchise, the series that put Gremlin Graphics on the map, but it’s not one that I’ve ever really engaged with before. As an Amstrad CPC owner, we didn’t get Wanted! Monty Mole, and I feel like I remember that Amstrad Action, the magazine which defined my childish tastes, considered something like the sequel Monty On The Run old and creaky by the time I was reading it.
However, the entire franchise is available to purchase on Steam and, in fact, in a collection on Nintendo Switch and Xbox. I do think it’s great that these games are commercially available, and I can’t speak to the Switch release, but the Steam releases are just the same low-effort porting job I saw in Match Day, and it’s kind of a bummer, because there’s history here that deserves more than just being lobbed up sans context.
Of course, it could be so much worse. I mean Manic Miner, probably one of the most important British games ever is being released in an AI-sodden remake that feels… it feels exactly as Hayao Miyazaki said, an insult to life itself.
The thing that gets forgotten, I feel–and I’m sorry, yes, we’re going to have another one of those “games history is global” discussions–is that even though it feels like platform game evolution went Donkey Kong–Super Mario Bros. there was so much parallel evolution going on. Donkey Kong was, of course, the originator, but if we look at the lineage of Wanted: Mighty Mole, it’s actually more like Donkey Kong–Miner 2049er–Manic Miner! Personally, I marvel about how deep and rich video games became so quickly, a Cambrian explosion ongoing at a time people think of being a crash.
I think it’s easy to say the fittest survived, but every time I return to this period–and especially when I’m touching the home computers of the era–I marvel at the ambition. It’s like people didn’t know what was possible, so they just went for it.
It doesn’t always work–to be honest, it usually didn’t work–but you’d get things that have still never quite been equalled like The Lords of Midnight. And while Wanted! Monty Mole is hardly at that level, it’s still possible to have a good time with it today–it was, after all, the winner of Crash’s Best Platform Game 1984.
One of the strangest aspects about Wanted! Monty Mole is its connection to the miners’ strike. It’s a complicated and controversial period in the history of organised labour, and I think it’s pretty easy to get the wrong idea about Wanted! Monty Mole, as it intentionally courted controversy with the setting as a marketing gimmick.
With the pitch that Monty Mole is dodging pickets, you might think you’re playing a scab (albeit a mole) who is mining in opposition to the National Union of Mineworkers, personified by its president Arthur Scargill. But it’s much more complicated than that, and it all relates to the actual facts of the strike, which had began in March 1984, just over four months before the release of Wanted! Monty Mole (designer Peter Harrap would complete the entire thing in just three of those months!)
You see, Arthur Scargill did not hold a national ballot to democratically authorise a strike, having lost three previous ballots, and instead either tried to force–or I believe in more charitable views, tried to allow the natural occurrence of–a national strike by domino effect, by supporting regional strikes and “calling for action” from all other local and regional chapters. The idea being that everyone would fall in line, especially under the pressure of “flying pickets” (striking miners who’d travel to other mines to picket them in an attempt to shame those miners into downing tools.)
I’m sure there is intelligent lefty analysis of this out there, so forgive me for my approximation (I at the very least recommend the BBC’s Miner’s Strike: A Frontline Story, which allows the miners to speak for themselves) but this does seem like just about the worst possible approach at the worst possible time. With not every miner on strike, this allowed some coal to still be produced, weakening the entire point of a strike, and flying pickets (pretty obviously) alienated many working miners who hadn’t been given a vote.
The strike would end in March 1985, with the miners comprehensively defeated by the Conservative government, ironically united behind Margaret Thatcher, who by all accounts viewed the entire thing as a convenient way to break the back of a union. It could, pretty much, not have gone worse.
And Wanted! Monty Mole represents just how tangled the situation was. Talking to Mark Hardisty in A Gremlin In The Works, Harrap is clear in his feelings, explaining that his father was a miner, and was directly affected:
“[Dad] was a democratic mineworker and he always used to say that the union would never be broken. We were solid because we had a vote … if we all voted on strike action, they would never break that. Even though Scargill was right in what he was saying … the miners never had a say. My dad never had a say.
[Scargill] is the baddie even though he was doing the right thing, or had the right intentions. He was doing it completely the wrong way.”
So Wanted! Monty Mole isn’t about a wee mole scabbing, and it’s right there on the tape inlay.
It seems that while Monty was initially intending to get down the mines and nick a bunch of coal to keep his home warm in winter, he ends up in conflict with Arthur Scargill as a result, and discovers that the only way to defeat him is the “secret ballot papers” and “vote casting scroll.”
The entire game is actually about the importance of voting and true union values in governance.
I think that’s incredible! The early history of video games does not feature a lot of games that are directly attempting to make a political point (even though, if I’m being honest, Wanted: Monty Mole is mostly “just” a wacky Manic Miner-inspired platformer.) Most obviously there’s Missile Command reflecting the nuclear anxiety of the time and making the argument that there is no winner in a nuclear war, maybe things like Dictator (a satire of banana republics) but I can’t find a game making an explicit, pointed statement like this at a moment where it could count.
(And they even offered the NUM 5p from every sale, which was foolishly ignored; considering the game sold 20,000 copies in the first six weeks, a lot of hungry miners and their families might have benefited from a donation of a thousand quid.)
Anyway. How good is Wanted! Monty Mole as a game, though?
It’s not bad, with caveats. Wanted! Monty Mole is pushing at the limits of the Manic Miner design without quite knowing where to take it. You aren’t just stealing coal across screens; you’re collecting items that you need to progress too, and the game’s world is one continuous level. But it’s all a bit… wonky. On the first screen you have to collect a bucket to see the coal at all, which is a good early teaching moment (take that, Super Mario! It’s not just Door Door that ate your lunch!) But from that point on it’s all a bit vague, generally being that picking up an item (like a drill) gives you a hit point that allows you to do things like touch candles, but if you touch an enemy first you lose that hit point and can no longer collect the coal.
Thankfully, there’s only a few sections where you have to backtrack in order to remove walls that block your way (although those are sort of buggy: collect all the coal on the screen with the wall before going back to collect a missed piece of goal and it won’t disappear) and the game is mostly “collect everything, avoid enemies.” The real issue is that collision detection is rough. Later in the game there will be a couple of sections that seem impossible without losing a life, or at one point relying on some very tight timing with a mine cart. But the design, more or less makes sense. Which is insane, because referring to A Gremlin In The Works again, Harrap designed the entire thing directly in machine code–he didn’t even plan for how screens would connect and had to match them up via testing!
On that level alone it’s a marvel it works as well as it does, especially because the world has such a sense of place–you actually do feel like you’re going down into a mine with a long chain of vertical screens. I do suspect this system is why the game doesn’t feel as tight as something like Manic Miner–screens aren’t stuffed with enemies or carefully designed challenge, it’s a bit quiet, and it’s mostly the collisions detection that you’ll come a cropper to–although there’s a chance that like me you’ll get to the end, not be able to defeat Arthur Scargill and not be sure why.
Does it “hold up”? No, not really. Did I feel a nostalgia for the era anyway, and appreciate its hidden depths? Absolutely.
Wanted: Monty Mole didn’t come out on the CPC–to be fair, the CPC 464 had only come out barely a month earlier–but it was released on the Commodore 64, in a slightly strange fashion: rather than have it ported, Gremlin founder Ian Steward took the decision to have Antony Crowther use his Son Of Blagger engine to make a parallel version of Wanted: Monty Mole seemingly without, apparently, letting either Harrap or Crowther aware they were making the same game. Once they knew (a couple of months into a three month project!) they did their best to create some parity by having the same opening screen, but the games are massively different, with Crowther’s a tight platformer with a maze-like single level featuring full directional scrolling.
It’s also absolutely awful, a single-life attrition platformer where Monty has a health bar and basically need to take damage constantly to progress because he’s almost impossible to control (maybe it was the emulation, but I found it a nightmare to get him to jump off a small platform, he usually just fell off.) The level design is extremely unclear (you have to notice which walls you can walk through) and features lots of backtracking and dead ends.
The worst thing about it? The climax with Arthur Scargill isn’t even in it–you cross an acid pit to a dead end and that’s it. You do get the poem that ends the ZX Spectrum version, at least.
There’s absolutely no reason to play this, but I suppose the C64 will have the last laugh–everyone prefers the C64 version of Monty On The Run because of the music.
Will I ever play it again? Onwards to Monty On The Run! Oh, hang on, I mean Monty Is Innocent, the one everyone forgets.
Final Thought: One of the nicest things about Monty Mole–although I didn’t directly experience it–is that it’s got a proper ending, with a poem that fills out the story and even hints at a future sequel. Considering in this era of home computer games games mostly just stopped because they ran out of memory (the absolute worst when you excitedly got an arcade conversion, accepting that it wouldn’t be “quite” as good, and found it stopping abruptly in level 3 or something) this is another example of the care put in here that makes this worth remembering.
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Denshattack! (Undercoders, 2026)
Developed/Published by: Undercoders / Fireshine Games
Released: 15/07/2026
Completed: 18/08/2026
Completion: Finished it.Are video games still… cool? I was trying to think about this. Being old, I remember the 90s and the era of the PlayStation, all Lara Croft on the cover of The Face and Wipeout demo kiosks at clubs, and when I think about it, the era of video games being actively cool feels like it ended with the Dreamcast. Maybe it’s a limited way of looking at things–connecting video games to youth and music culture via games like Rez and Jet Set Radio–but once you get into the PS3 and Xbox era… doesn’t it all feel a bit less organic, more corporate?
I know, I know. “Cool” is so completely undefinable, and so completely subjective and contextual. And it’s not like Sega weren’t a huge corporation (certainly Sony’s “cool” was a marketing effort.) But when I look at Jet Set Radio, I just see something that’s… cool. It makes it look effortless.
Denshattack! wants to reclaim that cool.
The thing about Jet Set Radio is that it’s… not actually that great? In fact, when I played it a few years ago on PlayStation Vita I was struck by how close it skirts to “actively bad.” The stiff, awkward controls. The horrible camera. The overall clumsiness. Awful enemies and boss battles. You never get to feel mastery, you never reach flow; ironically, you never ever feel cool playing it.
But the overall package is so incredible that it never tips you over into complete rejection (at least for me, anyway.) It’s perhaps the peak of style over substance, and therefore a valid swan song to the era of games being cool. It gets away with it.
Denshattack! does not.
Now, don’t get me wrong. Denshattack!–apart from some issues I had getting comfortable with the controls–has none of the rough edges you find with Jet Set Radio. It’s an incredibly efficient and focused bit of game design, really determined to give you all of the heights of mastery and pleasure with as little friction as possible. But it’s too focused, too efficient, and in slathering on a particular style of cool it comes across as pastiche. Denshattack! can never live up to the Jet Set Radio we have in our minds, because… how could it?
The design sounds good. Denshattack!’s core is, rather than Jet Set Radio, Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater, just that instead of being a skater in a skate park, you’re a train on a track, with the (silly, intentionally unexplained but completely accepted) ability to jump in the air and do tricks. Levels are a mix of A to B courses, levels where you have objectives and have to loop them till you’re done, race courses, trick courses (the closest in style to Tony Hawks’ skate parks) and boss battles. It’s a lot of variety!
The problem is that… and it sounds sort of stupidly obvious to say this… you’re a train on a track. You’re propelling forward at all times, and you don’t have many “interesting decisions” to make. Yes, you can switch tracks here and there, but there is none of the immediate, constant decision making in Tony Hawk’s; where to move next, which trick to pull, how to actually manufacture a long chain. Here, the track always flows towards you, and the level furniture that flows in your direction are the sum of your options.
It’s obvious that the developers know this, so the game–which is astonishingly long, with over sixty levels–introduces new mechanics throughout. The game doesn’t honestly feel that much like Tony Hawk’s once you’re a little way into it, instead feeling much more like a cross between a rhythm action game and the more dexterity-testing style of Metroidvania; it’s not “chain tricks” but “chain abilities, and trick between them.”
Like the worst examples of the Metroidvania, however, the problem is that you end up with what feels like forty things to do spread all across the controller, clicking shoulder buttons here and pushing other things elsewhere in rapid succession or you fail. This doesn’t create interesting situations or interactions, just lists of things to do in order. At least in a Metroidvania the abilities are there to be used on things you saw earlier, or traversal you have to work out; here again it’s more like a rhythm action game. It comes towards you. Do the move. Now this one.
Denshattack!, as a result, never transcends “fine.” There’s a few hours, I think, where after the controls click, it’s actively fun! But before long it feels very rote; rather than the sense you’re on a train to adventure, it feels more like you’ve clocked in at the video game factory and you’re stood at a conveyor belt, having to perform a set, pre-arranged actions as they flows towards you.
With the game as long as it is, Denshattack! is not so much “too much of a good thing” as “too much of a… thing.” There are many, many sicknesses in the video games industry now but the requirement that games be stuffed with content is absolutely one of them. I understand the impetus. Publishers want big numbers; players want as much bang for their buck as they can get, and Steam and other platforms absolutely incentivise high hour counts.
But in a game like Denshattack!, where the core design is slight, and the games it references are shorter with levels built around replayability… it feels like a completely wrong assumption was made by the team here. Every level has a bunch of stuff to do, to collect, and medals to get for either doing it as fast as possible, or with the highest score, but it’s just not that interesting to go back to do it! You can’t make a beeline to a particular item you missed, or find a favourite part of the level and trick that… even the micro decisions of movement you’d make in a track-based racing game are all missing. I still kept thinking, “Oh, I could go back to gold medal earlier levels with all my new skills” but there’s no particularly strong reason to do so–there’s so much content that you’re far better pushing forward.
Long, and I mean long before I was done with this I was bored out of my mind. It doesn’t help that there’s a lot of setting and narrative layered on that is simply not compelling either. There’s a good heart here–a cheerful anime protagonist gets together a rag-tag group of gangs to take down a corporation that’s been exploiting Japan–but much like the game’s design, it’s a fine enough idea without enough meat to actually support an actual… story.
I hate to be all Robert McKee here but a story needs, you know… characters with wants and needs in conflict, and scenes need to reflect that. In Denshattack!, nothing happens! Characters stand around and spout platitudes at each other in every cutscene. It’s all plot and no story, and it’s simply very dull. It feels so egregious because I can feel the game’s certainty that actually really amazing stuff happens. During the levels there are big moments (explosions, kaiju battles, all sorts) and there’s this drive towards a huge, powerful climax that really put me in mind of the climax of Hi-Fi Rush–everyone coming together in this beautiful, moving moment… but it’s completely flat because the characters were just… well, they were about as deep as the billboards you’d fly past on a train.
I think after attempting to beat Titanium Court to death for what it did to me, you might say I’m just being cruel now. That I’m punishing Denshattack! for simply offering too much, and for not nailing every aspect. And, well, maybe that’s fair. Denshattack! is… fine, and it’s only that it goes on for so long that made it such a miserable slog.
But I think game developers have got to learn to edit. Denshattack! is a perfectly fine experience if it’s four or six hours and I can go back and replay the levels if I want; I think I’d have come out overall positive on it, even. So if there’s one lesson from this I want to impress: cut what you’re making down to a diamond. No one wants the rest of the rock!!!
Will I ever play it again? No.
Final Thought: I mentioned the controls needing to click; if you think you’re the kind of person who could play this and stop before you’re tired of it, it’s worth saying that I found the controls utterly frustrating when I started. Rather than go for a classic Tony Hawks’ style system–d-pad, buttons–it goes with double analogues and triggers, and there’s a learning curve because of the issue of track switching: you have to tap left or right on the left thumbstick to switch tracks, but meanwhile when tricking you’re moving the right thumbstick left and right, and at least for my brain it felt like I should have been switching tracks during tricks but you’re not.
In something like Tony Hawks’ you’re initiating a “state change” via button presses (e.g. ”I am holding trick button, so pushing left means trick; when I release trick button, pushing left means move left”) and here you don’t have that anchor, so I was constantly messing up at first. It does become normal after a point, so it’s not something I can exactly ding the game for any more than I already have, but I was really close to giving this up at the point when it started to click.
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Door Door (Chunsoft, 1985)
Developed/Published by: Chunsoft / Enix
Released: 18/07/1985
Completed: 31/08/2026
Completion: Made it to level 50, saving after ever level.After playing the first (well, at least on Famicom) Square game for Pixels and Polygons Quarterly, King’s Knight, taking a look at the earliest output of the other eventual half of Square Enix, Enix, seemed to only make sense. However, much like Square, Enix’s early output was focused on the home computers of the era, so I’ll similarly skip to the first Famicom release, but Enix took a pretty interesting route into the video games industry that’s more than worth recounting.
Beginning as a publisher of real estate listings(!) in 1975, by 1982, after struggling to get a foothold as a trader/brokerage, owner Yasuhiro Fukushima had decided to make the (frankly, not obvious) transition into video game publishing. But how to get games, considering Fukushima knew nothing about making games, or even hiring the people to do so?
Well, according to Chris Kohler’s Power-Up: How Japanese Video Games Gave The World An Extra Life, inspired by the manga industry, which attracts new talent via contests, he thought he’d simply do the same thing, launching the “First Game Hobby Programming Contest” with three million yen in prize money (in return for claiming the copyright of the winning games…)
However, I think Fukushima was at least clued into the games industry enough that it wasn’t purely inspired by the manga industry. In this advert for the contest (via bowloflentils) Fukushima’s play is inspired by the “bedroom coder” boom of the US (and UK) promising to crown the first “new star” and promising they’ll become popular “like rock stars.”
“Now in America, programs are being made by the ‘young software new stars’.” This is pretty bold, but it attracted what would ultimately become legends of the industry such as Yuji Horii, so… fair enough? However, this contest does feel like a classic trick that’s still pulled today: run a contest for a small prize, then monetise the work of the winners, and laugh all the way to the bank.
But what’s that! In the small print: “we will pay royalties.”
Now, to be honest, I don’t have any idea how fair these royalty agreements were, but if we take Enix at their word, they’re extremely happy to crow about the success their previous winners had by the time of the third contest, explicitly showing Door Door creator Koichi Nakamura’s royalties:
“In the month of March, he received 4,067,220 yen [$18,000 USD1] in royalties from Enix” So this obviously worked out for Enix, they’d upped the prize money, and become even more magnanimous, as by the third contest copyright is retained by the author–though they’ll get exclusive sales rights for the winning entries, so maybe it wasn’t functionally that different.
Indeed, this system gave Enix an incredible amount of games to release in a way that I’m sure many other publishers couldn’t compete with: in their first month of releases fresh off the contest, they put out an astonishing thirteen games (if records are to be believed) the majority of which hadn’t won anything so no initial outlay at all! But at this point, for these hobbyist coders, getting any royalties at all probably felt like hitting a jackpot.
But of course, as we see from the above advert, Door Door was the super mega jackpot. The kind where all the lights on the machine are going off and tokens are spilling onto the floor up to your knees.
And it didn’t even win that first contest! It came second to a turn-based strategy game!
Door Door is interesting because it doesn’t just have a place in history as Enix’s first big game, but also as Chunsoft’s first game. Chunsoft, weirdly, don’t seem to quite get their due in at least the western view of the Japanese game history, where I think their name is most often connected to the Mystery Dungeon/Shinren The Wanderer series.
Now, don’t get me wrong, that’s a great series, but Chunsoft developed the first five Dragon Quest games! Yuji Horii and Akira Toriyama didn’t just do it all by themselves!
And, frankly, they made Door Door. And Door Door is… great!
Inspired by Dig Dug–in fact Nakamura was originally making a clone, before switching to something simply inspired by the idea of herding enemies2–it’s almost surprising that I’d say it’s great, because Dig Dug is crap, and when you first play Door Door it’s going to feel slow and a tad unresponsive. The first time you climb a ladder, you’re going to be like… is this honestly how long it’s going to take to climb ladders in this game.
But frankly? Chill out. I approached Door Door a little differently than I have maybe other puzzely, actiony Famicom/NES titles, where I tend to binge them. Door Door’s slower pace and deterministic enemy design engendered a different tact: I loaded it onto my Trimui Brick and just played a couple of levels now and then in breaks and downtime. I treated it a bit more like… Picross… actually no, wait, I tend to binge that too. Perhaps more relatably something like Puzzmo: pop in, a little brainteaser, a palate cleanser, and then move on.
Now, to be fair: this obviously wasn’t the exact intention for Door Door. In fact, I dug around and I couldn’t find a way to continue in Door Door, which is disappointing, so it was intended for the player to get through it in one go. But it’s also 2026 and we’ve got quick saves and the author is dead, so it’s fine.
That said: if you did want to play it “for real” part of the reason Door Door is so good is that the game is an early masterpiece of teaching you how to play it while playing it. For everything that’s said about Super Mario Bros.’ famous first screen, Door Door does the exact same thing here, opening with a level with the hero, a door, and an enemy, where all you can do is open the door, getting the enemy into it, and then closing it, winning the level: teaching you that the entire game is about clearing the level of enemies by getting them to walk into doors–from the right direction (enemies can only walk into doors in the direction that they slide open.)
Did the Shigster see this before making Super Mario Bros? You might say “well, hang on. The original Door Door doesn’t have this design at all!” To which I’d respond: but the update Door Door mkII does–if anything it’s even more teacherly, the Famicom version more of a supercut–and that came out over six months before Super Mario Bros.!!!
Alright, it’s still a bit of an edge case, but Shiggy-Shig-Ah [“Stop this. It’s not the 90s any more”–Ed.] was kind of sniffy about Pac Land‘s influence, which makes me think he probably was inspired by Door Door mkII. I mean it was a huge hit!
Anyway, Door Door doesn’t just teach you once. What I love about Door Door is that it regularly gives you new “training” levels that teach you a technique that you can use from then on–and, in fact, from the beginning of the game. It’s almost Öoo like in its clever use of the hero Chun’s simple actions (just move, climb and jump!) when interacting with the enemies. You’ve always been able to do these things; you just don’t realise until the game forces to you do them.
The enemies are the other trick to the game: they’re deterministic, like Pac-Man’s foes, but in a slightly richer environment. So, for example, you’ll face enemies that beeline towards you, some that always climb ladders when they approach them, and the most threatening foe, the one that jumps whenever you do, meaning you can never dodge, them only run.
With all of these enemies on screen, there’s really a puzzle to every level, but it’s not really a “pressure/puzzle” platformer, one of my least favourite styles. The enemies are a threat, but because you can jump, and they’re pretty slow too, you can get a lot of time to lead them a merry dance as you try and work out the best way to dispatch them–and then, if you do die, when you restart any you’ve killed are still dead, allowing you to move forward, but ultimately the goal is to wipe them out all in one life (I’ll admit I died to move on a couple of times.)
Honestly, it’s really elegant, especially with the addition that if you can get a lot of enemies in one door at once and close it before they leave, you get a bonus, meaning there’s an incentive to use every skill you learn across the game to clump enemies together. So, for example, you’re taught early that you can jump to avoid opening doors. Then you can jump to get the jumping enemies to switch platforms–or stop them crossing the screen boundary. And soon this compounds, and you’re ripping through a few levels when you really meant to only do one while you waited for the tea to brew.
If there’s a problem with Door Door it’s that the design does allow the player to get into no-win situations (there are a lot of levels where there are less doors than enemies as part of the puzzle) which requires a bomb spawning for players to suicide, and that the last level is a bizarre test of timing your jumps that honestly I thought was just a corrupted screen. You can complete it, but considering it just loops the game, not even a congratulations, it’s not really worth doing.
But everything up to that point is! Not bad for a game that didn’t even win the contest it was made for!
Will I ever play it again? Honestly, after beating it I’ve had a few goes playing it for “real” with all my new Door Door skills and it’s not unpleasant.
Final Thought: What with the (possible) Miyamoto inspiration, I got a bit excited when I remembered that hated Phillips CD-i Mario game Hotel Mario was all about doors, thinking maybe there would have been a funny example of (not quite) simultaneous discovery there considering the game was made in America by people who would have never seen Door Door and Miyamoto never touched it. No such luck, Mario closes doors but he just jumps on enemies like usual. Oh well!
- According to a historical exchange rate I dug up, which may or may not be exactly on the money. But crikey, the yen was weak in the early 80s, huh? A similar amount of royalties would net $25,000 today, and the yen feels weak right now! ↩︎
- According to an interview translated by the ever reliable shmuplations.com. ↩︎
