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.

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.)

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.

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.)

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.)

This fucking thing.

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.

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 practicing 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.

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.)

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.

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.)

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 9×9 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.

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.