I have been surrounded by puzzles my entire life. I mean this literally. My father is a bonafide puzzler. Not jigsaw puzzles; I'm talking pen and paper puzzles. His peg is wordplay. Crosswords, cryptics, anagrams, cryptograms, all of it. He has taken my family to puzzle conventions often. He's a prolific constructor, too. He's been published in a certain major newspaper multiple times and even runs puzzle hunts regularly. It gets annoying, sometimes. I don't mind the test solves he asks of us. It's the other stuff. He'll turn a simple dinner conversation topic into a riddle, a game of guessing, hamfisting puns and clues. I think in my teenage years, that frustration with parents dripped down onto puzzles. I considered them geeky, dorky, not something I would ever like, no no no. Alas, my hat is thoroughly chewed; puzzles are fun. I'm nowhere near the kind of puzzler he is, not even close, but I've come around on it. I'll toy with a crossword, I’ll knock out a KenKen, I'll give a cryptic a shot (and fail), and I'll play Wordle.

Wordle is Mastermind but with letters. It's not a complex or new idea; this has been done before and will be done again. That's not a criticism. It's just a fact. It's a slick, well-made version of it created by Josh Wardle for his girlfriend. It works. It's fun. The key difference was the ease by which you could share your solutions online. Presumably, this was a huge influence on its popularity, which abruptly skyrocketed in the tail end of 2021. Seeing people post their scores is near ubiquitous, whether you were on Discord or Twitter. It’s a fun daily distraction to toil over. The limit of guesses encourages some strategizing. On Discord, we crafted theories and ran simulations. It became a delightful little problem of probabilistic reduction and linguistic statistics.

But I’m not here to talk about Wordle, but rather what’s happening to it. Puzzles seem to be on an abrupt uptick. I have no clue why. In the past year, I've seen people I'd never expect to talking about daily crosswords in the New York Times. Spelling Bee in the New York Times Magazine is also wildly popular and served as an inspiration for Wordle. If I had to guess why, it would have to be due to the global pandemic having a lot of people down-time they would typically spend doing something else. As well as, perhaps, the NYT's strategy of pushing their Games publication. Maybe you’re noticing something.

A few weeks ago, Microsoft bought Activision Blizzard. A bit later, Sony bought Bungie. Now, the New York Times has bought Wordle. Maybe this seems unrelated to you. But I can't help but see it as part of a pattern of rapid consolidation of gaming markets. Obviously, this is a widespread issue not limited to games, or media for that matter. Mergers and acquisitions seem to show up every few weeks. Anti-trust law isn't what it used to be in the US, and companies are constantly cannibalizing each other. By all means, Josh Wardle made the right choice. He was probably losing money by hosting Wordle, and he was smart to cash out. Good for him.

The NYT did not buy Wordle because it was a novel invention. The NYT bought it because it wants to be the only thing you think of when you think of the word "puzzles". Don't think of just any old newspaper, don't think of other websites or apps, don't think of GAMES Magazine or Nicoli or even those airport pulp bricks, think of the New York Times and the New York Times Magazine only. They could have easily made a Wordle version of their own. They wanted the name and the brand recognition. They want you to remember where the puzzles are. The only puzzles. Are they succeeding?

Wordle won’t die after this. It’s going to live forever. It’s been assimilated into the Borg. “Join us or die.” Even as folks burn out on it, or it’s fad-fame withers, there will still be countless players. It’s in the New York Times, after all. Will it stay popular? Probably. To some degree, certainly. And what of the countless Wordle-likes? The leagues of distractions, too numerous to list, ranging from copies to inventive reimaginings? Will they rise above it all? Well, I’m not optimistic. As much as I’d like to be able to say I think a wave of independent puzzles will come crashing down on the shore, spreading an anarchistic jubilee of puzzles on the sands, I don’t think that’s going to happen. It’s not going to happen in games, either. These moments result in flares of creativity and then a quiet march into obscurity. I’ve seen how hard it is to fight against cultural monopolies. Call it path-of-least-resistance, call it the Pareto principle, call it a process of preferential attachment, it’s gonna end up the same way: the slow oligopolization of cultural commodities with straggling indies. I’m not optimistic. I hope to be proven wrong. There’s a time for everything to come crumbling down. But until then, Wordle is fun. While it lasts.

dragon quarter boldly relies almost entirely on mystique. one of the most cryptic rpgs i've played, it cleverly strips the formula down to its bare essentials and managed to cart me along with few moving parts - the story itself is relatively simple once you have all the puzzle pieces aligned, and the main thrust is, essentially, to climb your way from the bottom of the map to the very top in hopes of finding a world still suitable for life.

the gameplay itself is reminiscent more of strategy rpgs than it is anything previously in the breath of fire catalogue. it took some while to adjust to, as the game gives very little direction on the ins and outs of gameplay; it felt a little like learning the ropes in divinity original sin ii, which is initially overwhelming and punishing but feels satisfying the closer you get to mastering how to exploit the resources you have.

essentially, you have a knight, gunner, and mage, who also correlate to your tank, utility, and support respectively. you learn new abilities not from leveling up but from random drops and purchases through the esoteric ant colony system, which i'll touch on in a second. characters like lin have hidden combos that allow for added effects when layered properly. a lot of moves you'll find it most beneficial to skip your turn and accrue AP, especially later in the game when bosses begin blocking damage that doesn't reach a minimum amount of damage done per combo.

in essence, the experience is a dungeon-crawler with occasional checkpoints to re-up on supplies. there's a level of risk and reward to every thing you do, though; you could spend all your money right off the bat or put it in the bank to hopefully make dividends. you could also stockpile your money (or your bonus xp) if you start feeling like your run is losing steam and you're anticipating having to restart.

the game's central gimmick is lies in its d-counter, which is constantly climbing but exponentially rises when you use ryu's dragon form, which can kill any enemy in the game in just a couple hits. each time you use this, though, you can expect to expend 5-10% of the d-counter. if the d-counter reaches 100%, your game is over, and you have the option of restarting completely and beginning with the bonus xp, items you've stored, weapons, and money, returning to your last save with this option (which sounds better than it really is - you lose everything in your stock, which could potentially softlock you right before the boss rush near the end, which happened to me!), or quitting and reloading your save without any changes. the save themselves are limited, requiring tokens to redeem when you reach a save point (which are few and far between). you can choose to play fast and loose and spend things as they come or reserve all these precious resources to the end.

despite the extremity, the game never feels truly cruel. it seems to rally around its central theme, finding freedom in a hopeless situation - this is an intensely lonely game, but shines with an occasional adolescent foolhardiness. dragon quarter really could have succeeded as a comic in the mid-00s or a late night toonami limited series. its darkness isn't purely aesthetic - it's quite baked into the plot, and some rather grim things buoy the sillier instances of action - but does get at a certain angst that permeated most forms of media around the time of its creation. its dedication, in my opinion, feels gainfully earned. dragon quarter goes to great lengths to make its psychotropic plot and undercurrent of zaniness work. it also, notably, features a storytelling device that requires failure to access its full story nearly two decades before hades, and an emphasis on playing the game multiple times with only minor changes two years before drakengard and, later, nier.

you don't have to traipse far on gamefaqs or youtube to see the sheer distaste gamers at the time had for this game, which speaks to the fact that dragon quarter has few-to-no contemporaries. as ardwyw points out in their review here, dragon quarter points out many of the phony aspects of not only the breath of fire series but of rpgs in general, and feels confrontational to the expectations of the people who play them. its existence as a "misunderstood" game pairs with its maudlin, emo aesthetic all the better; it's hard to say whether it's a love letter to rpgs or a scornful satire of them because of how carefully it toes the balance between these two modes. the game is fun and each battle feels unique, yet there are many instances when the rug can be pulled out from under you and, without some preventive save scumming through emulation, you'll end up on your ass.

it's notable that, were the music not as typical of rpg fare as can be, this game would be considered a horror rpg alongside parasite eve or koudelka. it seems pretty purposeful that hitoshi sakimoto was chosen for this, as his work for games like tactics ogre, final fantasy tactics, and vagrant story up until this point really defined what a medieval fantasy rpg feels like, the type of games capcom had been making in this series up until this point. instead, dragon quarter lacks any of those adventuresome, windswept elements - it's hard, mechanical, and sci-fi. all these aspects are remixed or stripped down as if to strip the veneer of illusion that goes into making a rpg, which is really a series of crunchy, quick numerical calculations being made in real-time.

this is a unique and maverick game that conspicuously has received very little mainstream reappraisal over the years. i bought it on ebay last year after having been interested in it for a while, and it was only around $27. it's odd to me that a game that so perfectly corresponds with the recent interest in post-modern expressions of rpg formulae could go so overlooked for so long. it's an uncut gem if there ever was one, unobserved and still interred waiting to be excavated from the bottom of a bargain bin.

I have a soft spot for this game. A Tomb Raider clone is kinda a weird direction for an action heavy game like Duke Nukem. However I think it was a pretty good clone. It played just as well as it did IMO. There was even a joke about it on stage 1. The constant one liners are actually pretty funny and don't overly repeat themselves like a lot of them do in this era.

You always start in this city stage first and through the bad guys time travel shenanigan's it keeps changing everytime you go back to it. The time periods were interesting enough and it always fun seeing the enemy variants dressed appropriately. Honesty I liked it a great deal and outside of Duke 3D I'd say it's the best Duke game.

it's wild how much more i would have loved this game if they had just gotten rid of Nolan North's discordant quipping (or literally all the voice acting period) and leaned into the rhythm game elements of the platforming and somber mythic tone. If this had been more like that original pre-release trailer with the Sigur Ros track (LOOK IT UP!) it could have been something really special. The gorgeous visuals suggest something ethereal and soft but the garbage disposal Joss Whedon dialogue totally mutilates any tranquil power they could have conveyed. This is like if shadow of the colossus starred David Spade. TOO MANY QUIPS!