The survival horror genre is one of my favorites, and the genre has Alone in the Dark to thank for where it got its beginnings, at least in its game design and 3D perspective. Due to its age, I never played it, nor any of the other, less popular, entries in the series, but I am glad to say I got to do so today. It released in 1992 for the MS-DOS, was developed by Infogrames and while it shows its age obviously, I actually enjoyed it a lot more than I initially thought I would. This game will receive a remake in just a few months after this review is posted.

In Alone in the Dark, you pick one of two characters. Edward Carnby, a private investigator, or Emily Hartwood, the niece of Jeremy Hartwood. Jeremy Hartwood is the reason both of them are looking to visit the 'Derceto' mansion, as Jeremy Hartwood used to live there and had died of suicide shortly before the start of this game. Edward Carnby is tasked to find a piano for an antique dealer, while Emily Hartwood wants to find out more about Jeremy's suicide, which supposedly is explained through a secret note hidden somewhere near the piano.

I thought that was a nice touch to give both characters different motives to visit the mansion instead of giving the player a simple choice of male or female. I decided to pick Edward Carnby, who, if I may, looks like an absolute chad. His chicken walk up the stairs in the game's introductory cinematic had me immediately enamored with this character.

What the cinematic also depicts is the character you have chosen driving to the mansion and, as they enter it, the door closing behind them. Next, they walk up the stairs to the attic, from where you start your mission to escape. From here, if you choose Edward Carnby, that's pretty much your only goal. You're thinking "Shit, why did I accept this job?" and try to get out. If you're Emily Hartwood, you actually have an additional reason to be there, which is "Why did my uncle kill himself and was he really just insane or was there something else going on?". Sure enough, there is something going on in Derceto manor.

The game has the characters you pick hold a monologue describing their motives for going into the mansion, but once you are there, have no more lines. Instead, the story is told through books, parchments and notes, which are voice acted by Jeremy Hartwood (for his own letters) and other voices. Some books are simply there to add to the atmosphere of the game, while others include useful information for puzzle solving that are 1) optional to read, as you can solve the puzzles without doing so and 2) also add to the lore and atmosphere. The voice actor for Jeremy Hartwood does a fantastic job of expressing the voice of a man who is losing his mind and added a lot to the storytelling.

Ultimately, unearthing the secret of Derceto mansion is not as much of a big deal as the journey to get there, and the entire process is not as fleshed out as we have become used to through the power of bigger memory storage, but it was enough to keep me intrigued and the form of storytelling is unique enough for its time that I personally enjoyed it more than you probably would if you play it after having played more modern survival horror games recently.

This is even more true when it comes to the gameplay, though I doubt anyone today would say that the game's gameplay is 'good' either way.

This is a survival horror game that introduced all the elements you'll be familiar with by now. You explore the mansion and look for items that you will need to solve puzzles, heal yourself or engage in combat. The game has an inventory management system that is weight-based, meaning you can only hold items up to a certain weight that is not noted anywhere. Items like first-aid kits remain in your inventory even after you use them up, so you have to manually throw them away to make space, which is an odd system but something I can appreciate for the fact that this is something unique to this game.

The game's controls are tanky and the action you can use by pressing the Action button "Space" is something you select in the inventory screen. Your options are FIGHT, which allows you to get into a hilarious fighting stance while pressing Space and punching/kicking is done by pressing arrow keys simultaneously. OPEN/SEARCH lets you search cupboards, wardrobes and cabinets while you stand next to them, CLOSE lets you close doors, PUSH lets you push stuff to reveal hidden areas and later on, you get a JUMP action that is used for late-game platforming segments that put the tank of the controls to World of Tanks-esque levels.

Alone in the Dark has a pretty great way to start you off in the attic. As you are still trying to grasp the controls, an enemy jumps into the room through the window and attacks you. You can kill it with your fists but will take some damage. Just as you think the danger is averted, another enemy comes up from a trap door and you engage him as well. For new players, these will both surprise you and you'll 100% of the time have a suboptimal approach. Because see, the game quite clearly is OK with you avoiding its combat system as much as possible. I'd like to think they had mercy with players even back then, as they knew how unspectacular the combat was and is.

What you can do here is push the wardrobe in front of the window and a chest on top of the trap door, which lets you avoid the combat here altogether. Later on in the game, you can close doors to do the same, avoid a ghost lady by simply ignoring her and skip fights by placing certain items next to the enemies to distract them, like a gramophone or a pot of soup. You do have to engage in combat multiple times, but you will quickly realize that the best way to get through the game is to avoid it as much as possible. The game also only has very few healing items that you can find, adding credence to this.

The game is quite short overall, it took me a bit over 4 hours to beat it, but it could easily be done quicker, if you figure out some puzzles faster than I did. A lot of the time I lost though was due to the controls, especially in the last third of the game that included platforming sections, where it was very easy to fall into the water.

Additionally, to beat the game you will need to make sure that you don't fall into that water because it will wet your matchbox, which means you can't light your oil lamp, which means you can't see in the dark. The last major area before the final boss is a dark maze, so I had to replay over half an hour after realizing that I could simply not beat the game anymore.

The atmosphere this game creates these days can be described as creepy in a funny way. I can imagine certain parts of the game to have been scary at the time, and fighting two enemies in the first area while you still try to understand the controls certainly does a great job of having you on edge from the get-go, but at this point in time I can't say I was ever truly scared. The chicken-walk your character does up and down the stairs is hilarious, the male character has the ugliest face in video-game history, the enemies look like cartoons rather than actually scary monsters and whenever you hit an enemy, the game plays a smack sound akin to what it would sound like when you bitch-slap somebody, which in addition to your character's fighting pose had me in tears during the intended-to-be tense opening fights. The best way the game genuinely scares you I think is through the random deaths that can occur at every step and with its random use of its spooky sound effects, which make you think that enemies are nearby, even if they aren't.

Overall, I can definitely recommend the game to survival horror fans, because it is enjoyable enough to warrant an afternoon of your time. It pioneered an entire genre, so I think it's definitely worth being played. Outside of fans of the genre, fans of video game history will surely find some enjoyment with this for a little while, but I wouldn't say it's a good game by today's standards, though it does a solid job as a graphic adventure through its simple yet clever puzzles.

STORYTELLING/CHARACTERS | 7/10

Two characters to choose with different motivations, though this doesn't impact the playthrough

Story (Voice acted) told through books, notes and letters, with plenty of optional texts to dive into

GAMEPLAY | 12/20

Enjoyable mix of exploration, puzzle solving and combat

A lot of enemies to fight or avoid, but which constantly keep you on your toes

Inventory management that has its charm because it is done in a unique way for its time, but wouldn't be a lot of fun once more games start doing it

Tank controls that you do get used to, but which aren't that good. Running animation in particular often just doesn't trigger

Too many cheap deaths means you'll need to save often or be ready to replay many parts of the game

MUSIC/SOUND/VOICE | 9/10

All text voice acted, but there is no in-game dialogue

Voice actor for Jeremy Hartwood has the best performance by far

Hilarious smacking sound when punching that didn't fit in with the atmosphere but still had me in tears from laughing

Sound effects are otherwise the scariest part about this game

Good soundtrack that fits the vibe of the game, accentuating both the mystery of the Manor and the horror within

GRAPHICS/ART DESIGN | 7/10

A rare 3D game for its time with charmingly ugly polygon graphics

Many areas in the mansion varying in appearance

Some scary, ominous looking characters like the ghost lady and the dancing ghosts in the dance hall

Odd choice for the design of many enemies

ATMOSPHERE | 8/10

Confident that it was rather scary for its time, though not quite as scary anymore (I don't get easily scared though, so your experience may differ)

The game does a good job of creating an uneasy atmosphere and has many moments that tell you to expect the unexpected, which keeps you on edge

The incredibly ugly design of the male character, the smacking sound when kicking/punching and the cartoonish look of some enemies make the game much more light-hearted in feel than probably intended

CONTENT | 7/10

Will take 2 to 5 hours to beat

Not many puzzles in retrospect, but plenty of interesting ones

Many items in the game simply useless however

LEVEL/MISSION DESIGN | 7/10

Some parts of the game can be approached in multiple ways

Game does a great job laying out the dangers in the game and you can feel gradually improving as you go

Attic part of the game is just superb game design

The basement and maze levels in the final third of the game were not so good

CONCEPT/INNOVATION | 10/10

The start of a whole genre as we would know it for years to come

REPLAYABILITY | 2/5

Two main characters, though will little difference in playstyle

You can tackle some parts a bit differently, as you gain more tricks

PLAYABILITY | 5/5

Worked well at all times

OVERALL | 74/100

(This is the 78th game in my challenge to go through many known games in chronological order starting in 1990. The spreadsheet is in my bio.)

I've had Papers, Please on my wishlist for many years. Finally picked it up for very cheap recently as part of the game's 10 year anniversary. Playing it taught me that I've been 10 years late to the party.

In this game, you are an "Inspector" at the border to Aristotzka, and your job is to check entry documents of everyone trying to enter. At first, you grant entry to Aristotzkians and deny it to every foreigner, but with every passing day, new rules are added and present ones change. By Day 20+, passports can be forged, both natives and foreigners need multiple different entry forms, you check for fingerprints to confirm identities, search bodies to check for contraband, detain criminals and also take part in shady activities as part of the main story if you want. The main story takes a lot longer than I imagined based on the premise, but the game keeps presenting new challenges to keep things interesting.

Whether you will enjoy the game yourself depends on how you feel about the core gameplay loop. As someone who does enjoy doing "mundane" tasks like looking over passports for discrepancies, I've enjoyed Papers, Please's gameplay a lot. It also sounds a lot easier than it is in practice. The number of times I made mistakes in this game is staggering. The game does a great job of making you feel and look dumb as hell. And it will happen to you often, simply because in the latter half of the story, there just is way too much to look out for that something small is tiny to slip by you. The only things I found a bit unfair were single letters being different in certain words (Citu instead of City is very hard to discern) and invalid height being a criteria too, since heights don't seem consistent enough.

There is also the part of the game being a low budget indie game. Not a bad thing, the game is a creative beauty, but the visual look is very simplistic and repetitive, there are very few sounds and tracks in the game, there are only a couple dozen faces in the game so they get repetitive too and all this combined adds to the repetitive feeling that comes up herre and there overall. This is one of those games though where a bigger budget wouldn't necessarily have done a whole lot for the overall experience relative to the potential income for the developer. As it stands, this is a very fun experience for the right player, a very unique experience no matter who you are (unless you're a border patrol agent irl) and one of the more creative games I've ever played. Check it out!

I love the Super Mario games, but I am not a fan of almost all Game Boy titles I have played in the past year. That's to be expected considering the handheld's limitations and the fact it loses its charm when emulated on a monitor, but based on this, you can maybe imagine how my expectations were both high and low for Super Mario Land 2: 6 Golden Coins. Its the sequel to Super Mario Land 1, which itself was the start of the Game Boy Mario platforming series. After Super Mario Land 2, Nintendo did not release a new mainline Mario platformer for a handheld system until New Super Mario Bros. for the Nintendo DS in 2006 (!) and didn't follow up on that until 2011 (!) with Super Mario 3D Land. However, Super Mario Land itself did get continued without Mario, and the name of the third game ended up being Wario Land: Super Mario Land 3, a character which was first introduced in Super Mario Land 2. Why did this game get another sequel? Simple.

Super Mario Land 2: 6 Golden Coins sold over 10 million copies over its lifetime and became the fifth best selling game for the Game Boy (Color), only to be beaten by the first Super Mario Land, Tetris and two sets of Pokémon games. It sold twice as much as the 6th placed game, Dr. Mario.

This game is a 2D platformer in the vein of the home system games. It improves significantly over the original, which released in 1989, while this game in particular released on October 21, 1992. The original had somewhat odd looking and very small sprites, bland environments and very little variety in gameplay. Super Mario Land 2 meanwhile feels like it was made for a different handheld due to how many more features it manages to pack into a Game Boy cartridge.

First up, sprites are a lot bigger. In general, you see a lot less of a level, but what you do see ends up being much more visibly pleasing as a result. Some games, like the Mega Man series on Game Boy, don't work this way because they are usually much more difficult and when you have a small screen like this, enemies showing up at the edge of the screen being right next to you can become a problem. In Mario, that didn't feel like an issue to me because the difficulty felt pleasant at all times. In Mega Man: Dr Wily's Revenge on the other hand, you are much more susceptible to unfair hits because you just can't react that quickly.

Second, environments look much more varied. Instead of same-y settings, the game is divided into six zones with their own themes. So you end up having multiple basic "tree" levels that you will remember from the opening levels of Super Mario World, but you also have water levels, the Mario zone with its moving floors and lego levels (here, what look like Lego bricks are actually N&B blocks from Nintendo which competed against Lego in the 60s and 70s) and there is even a Space Zone where you explore the moon and where Mario changes into a spacesuit. It's all done on a pretty basic level of course, since this is a Game Boy game whichever way you slice it, but presentation and variety does a lot to keep things fresh and interesting, and ends up putting this game into 'Recommended' territory for me.

To conclude, here is a summary of my thoughts on each area of the game.

STORYTELLING/CHARACTERS |3/10

- Story is explained in the manual. Wario took control of Mario's castle in Mario Land. That's it.
- Wario is a new character in the Super Mario franchise at the time of this game's release. This fact plus keeping things consistent with the enemies is where the game gets the points from me
- There is a commercial on YT for this game that introduces Wario. Very much worth checking out

GAMEPLAY | 15/20

- Great controls for the most part, but sometimes they can feel a bit slippery
- Next to your typical power-ups, there is a new one, the "Carrot", which is fun to use
- Well-balanced in terms of difficulty
- Plenty of variety, such as the water levels, the space levels and the Mario zone levels

MUSIC/SOUND/VOICE | 7/10

- No voice acting
- You'll instantly be familiar with the sound effects. As per usual, they are fantastic
- Good soundtrack, but no memorable tracks and not as good as for other Mario platformers (my favorites: Athletic, Tree Top and Star Maze)

GRAPHICS/ART DESIGN | 7/10

- Graphics on the poorer side with the industry now firmly in the 16-bit era
- Game makes up for the Game Boy's limitations through presentation
- Varied locations make for a pleasant experience for the eyes, unlike the original Super Mario Land

ATMOSPHERE | 8/10

- Great overworld with 6 unique zones
- Plays and feels like a typical Mario platformer

CONTENT | 8/10

- 6 zones with multiple stages on each
- A few extra optional stages
- Bonus levels for ringing bell at the end of each stage
- High quality and varied content

LEVEL/MISSION DESIGN | 9/10

- The game allows you to choose in which order you want to tackle the zones
- The zones have variety in style and challenge
- Difficulty is fair, stages never felt like they were made extra difficult just to pad playtime

CONCEPT/INNOVATION | 6/10

- Conceptually not different from the home console Mario platformers
- Added a couple new features like the Carrot power-up and balloons that you can ride into the 'sky'
- New iconic character introduced
- Probably did as much as they could with the Game Boy's limitations

REPLAYABILITY | 2/5

- Main replay value comes from beating your high scores
- You can find a few extra secrets

PLAYABILITY | 5/5

- Worked well at all times

OVERALL | 70/100

(This is the 74th game in my challenge to go through many known games in chronological order starting in 1990. The spreadsheet is in my bio.)

Earthworm Jim is probably the best animated video game since Battletoads at the time of its release, and I think it's fair to say that those two games were just at their own level in that regard beyond any other game on the market. It's hard not to be amazed at how much work went into dozens of different animations, whether it's for shooting, whipping, getting bitten in the butt, pulled from side to side by a raven biting at your head and more.

Unfortunately, as a game, Earthworm Jim was probably one of the more frustrating experiences I've had during my 100+ game journey from 1990 to this game's October 30, 1994 release date. A poor control scheme that I not once really felt in control of, enemies popping up and attacking you less than a second after they become visible, environmental objects pulling, pushing and locking you up while you try to just get past them, and a slight delay in movement made this very, very annoying to play.

The visuals are great, the soundtrack was nice to listen to, sound effects are well done and funny, but unless I find a time machine that brings me back to the late 90s and early 00s with nothing but Earthworm Jim to play, I don't see how I would ever force myself to push through this game.

(This is the 103rd game in my challenge to go through many known games in chronological order starting in 1990. The spreadsheet/blog is in my bio.)

(This is the 23rd game in my challenge to go through many known games in chronological order starting in 1990. The spreadsheet is in my bio.)

Did you know? Journey to Silius was originally meant to be a Terminator game. As Sunsoft lost the license mid-development, story and graphics were changed. In more recent news, the game was ported over to Nintendo Switch in 2019 for Switch Online subscribers, in case you're curious.

Journey to Silius is a run & gun video game developed by Sunsoft and released on August 10th, 1990 for the NES. The composor is Naoki Kodaka, and I mention that because he was the composer for a game I reviewed more recently: Batman for the Sega Genesis (I was a big fan of the soundtrack).

Whether the soundtrack is good here too, what the game is even about and whether I liked it I will discuss in more detail below.

____________

STORYTELLING
You play Jay McCray, who is the son of a scientist who was responsible for the development of space colony #428 at a time where emigration to space colonies has become necessary due to overpopulation of the Earth. Jay's father dies during development and leaves behind a floppy disk, where he's recorded a message. He says that terrorists are looking to destroy the colony, so Jay sets out to protect the colony and avenge his dad.

This is where the story begins and the storytelling pretty much ends. From here on out, you find yourself on the space colony and kill terrorists / aliens and once you defeat the final boss, a few-second long cutscene plays before the end credits roll. So if you're here for any sort of story, you'll get a setting that is slightly more detailed than usual but nothing beyond that.

GAMEPLAY
This is another pretty average platformer in just about every way. You use a hand gun to start the game and get up to 6 by the end of it, the most unique being the homing missile. There are 5 stages, each side-by-side platforming stages with a boss at the end. That's a formula that has worked very well at that time but it is really simple, not innovative at all and since the game really doesn't have enough features or a fun enough gameplay loop, it grows stale quickly and the reliance on the same formula is not really justified.

The way the levels are designed (I'll crap on that a bit more later) is just so frustrating because it makes it very, very hard to reliably dodge enemy attacks. There are so many of them that just are at spots that you can't reach, which means you will most of the time just tank the damage and move forward.

I also can't say I got much out of the 6 weapons on offer. Once you knew what to do, the hand gun did just fine, but you only knew what to do after suffering through a part multiple times.

In the end, I did beat the game in about 3 hours, and the formula DOES work in that it offers a little bit of fun next to all the frustration. But it would have been a lot less fun without the great soundtrack on offer, as I describe below.

MUSIC/SOUND/VOICE
No voice acting. Sound design ranged from OK to good, with the weapons sounding satisfying enough. The soundtrack is great, similarly to what the composer managed to do for the Batman Sega Genesis game. Banger after banger almost throughout. Unfortunately all boss fights use the same track and I would have definitely enjoyed more variety there, especially since the track that exists loops pretty quickly and isn't the highlight of the OST.

GRAPHICS/ART DESIGN
The game looks pretty good. It was actually designed with a space colony in mind (plenty of games didn't always stay true to their setting among the games I've played so far). The game makes good use of colors, the enemy design is mostly solid (apart from the bosses) and especially the outside stages allow for some great, detailed background work. Unfortunately, some of the boss fights simply took place with a simple black background, whilst the final one for example showed distant planets, stars and space stations. Not sure why they did that.

ATMOSPHERE
The game does a good job here. The way the levels are designed artistically suit the theme.

CONTENT
The game is on the shorter side - it took me roughly 3 hours to beat it - and there isn't much to it. All levels are pretty much: move side to side, choose one of 6 weapons to fire and do some (not so great) platforming until you get to the boss. No other content to mix it up, no power up items or the like and no real story progression. What does exist is fine but this is a fairly skippable game as far as the history of video games is concerned.

LEVEL/MISSION DESIGN
It's a pretty simple concept as far as the level design goes. A level starts and you have to go through a bunch of enemies, do some platforming and hope you don't die to gravity and then fight a boss. You do that a few times and then you beat the game, but the game is purposely frustrating to make it harder to beat within a rental time, which hopefully leads to the player (or their parents) to buy a copy outright.

The game doesn't shy away from this formula and there just aren't enough features here to justify it being so stale. Also, one of my biggest minor complaints, is that the game requires you to jump down a lot without being able to see what's there. And what's there usually is an enemy, so I very often either would step on them and take damage, or they would shoot a millisecond after I landed and I would take damage from that. It's just bad.

In its whole, level design isn't necessarily bad, it's just bland.

CONCEPT/INNOVATION
There isn't really anything that I can think of that this game did that you didn't see before. Science fiction as a theme for a platformer, based on my experiences so far, were on the rarer side at the time, so there is that. Plus the soundtrack is definitely well above average and if you check the game's wikipedia page, you can read a bit about how the composer did some different stuff there, but other than that, this is a pretty forgettable game.

REPLAYABILITY
The game doesn't even have a high score system as far as I can tell, so the only reason you would want to replay it is for the sake of wanting to play it again. On its own the game doesn't incentivize this however.

PLAYABILITY
The game works well at all times.

OVERALL
"Make an average platformer, hire a great composer, slap the Terminator license on it and boom, you got a great seller. Oh but wait, you can't use the license anymore - Crap! Well then just make it its own world and release it." That's what I feel like the game's development looked like. This game is certainly playable and as I said, average, but I doubt many people remember it fondly for being a classic rather than a nostalgic and fun experience, which is fine if that's the case.

WHAT THEY SAID AT THE TIME
- Andromeda for GamePro, Issue 16 (Nov 90): "Journey to Silius features great graphics and a dynamite sound track. However, in terms of substance, the game doesn't quite live up to the way it looks."
- Steve Harris for EGM, Issue 14 (Sep 90): "This game is not going to win any awards for being new or innovative, but Sunsoft does manage to introduce some new twists to the standard action/shooting theme." | Steve agrees with my opinion of 30+ years later as far as innovation goes, but I'd like to know what those "twists" are that the game apparently introduces

(This is the 104th game in my challenge to go through many known games in chronological order starting in 1990. The spreadsheet/blog is in my bio.)

Thanks to this challenge I finally played so many beloved Nintendo franchises for the first time in my life. Metroid, Zelda, Kirby and now, I finally played my first ever Donkey Kong game: Donkey Kong Country. I knew next to nothing about this game before playing it and I still know next to nothing about the rest of the games, but after playing Donkey Kong Country, I'm definitely excited to check out whichever games next for this character.

Donkey Kong Country released on November 18, 1994 and was developed by Rare. Rare developed 3 games before this that I actually played, namely Captain Skyhawk, Battletoads and The Amazing Spider-Man for the GameBoy. While I didn't necessarily enjoy all of these games (I'm looking at you Amazing Spider-Man), I saw even then that Rare are capable of developing good games, it's just gonna be a budgetary thing that'll decide the overall quality. So Rare developing a game for Nintendo sounded like a great combo before playing this, and turns out, it was.

Donkey Kong Country went on to sell over 9 million copies (3rd best-selling SNES game, best Donkey Kong game), which led to two sequels on the SNES that released in 95 and 96, which I'll check out for sure. But not before sharing my thoughts on this game. :)

STORYTELLING/CHARACTERS | 3/10

There is no actual storytelling in the game. You control Donkey Kong and his nephew Diddy Kong to rid Donkey Kong Island of the Kremlings and to reclaim your bananas that were stolen. This is all explained in the manual exclusively, which has a nice, longer-than-usual story explaining the setting for the game. In the game itself, there are a few characters you meet who will help you out. Funky Kong, the cool dudebro surfer gorilla, who flings you back to a previously finished level really fast if you want to, Candy Kong, Donkey Kong's love interest according to the manual who saves your game, and Cranky Kong, an elderly and wise gorilla who gives you tips. His bio is pretty hilarious because he is apparently the Donkey Kong who featured in the games from the 80s and wants nothing to do with the fancy visuals of (then-)modern day. Legend.

But you're not gonna be playing this for the story and characters, but for the gameplay, the levels and the music.

GAMEPLAY | 14/20

Donkey Kong Country is a 2D platformer like many others before it. It differentiates itself mainly due to its main character and his barrel-flinging escapades, as well as the amount of space he takes up in the otherwise rather small levels. This changes the dynamic of avoiding enemies and objects somewhat because you have to be more precise with your inputs in many of the levels, which is one of the main reasons why Donkey Kong Country is not as easy as it may seem. There is a save system in place, both in-game and in-emulator (if you want), as well as a generous number of extra lives you can get as you play, so beating the game is by no means impossible, but you'll die more often than you think.

Donkey Kong and Diddy Kong run alongside each other and you can swap them out whenever you want. That's worth it at specific points because Diddy Kong is smaller (good for water levels), runs faster and jumps higher, but Donkey Kong is stronger (kills enemies by jumping on them just once instead of twice), grabs vines automatically and can hold a barrel over his head instead of just in front of him, which matters depending on enemy positioning.

There are many obstacles to face in the game, and they continuously change up as you play. The game uses the same items and enemies throughout, but makes use of them pretty creatively. The main challenges include avoiding enemies or killing them by jumping on top of them / rolling into them, grabbing ropes/vines to jump across platforms, jumping into barrels which catapult you forward and chaining together some of these challenges to get to otherwise inaccessible areas, which unlock bonus rooms. There are also mine cart levels, underwater levels and rainy levels which make the floor slippery (always love those), so the challenge is constant and varied enough. The difficulty is mostly fair, but not perfect.

Each world ends with a boss fight. These are pretty simple, which is typical for Nintendo platformers I find. Find a good time to jump on top of the enemy, repeat this 5 times (with Donkey Kong) and the enemy is down. Apart from the final boss, I found these to all be easy.

Overall, it's a fun loop and it's one of the better platformers for its time. Donkey Kong's move set is more limited than I would have liked, so I hope the sequels improve upon that, but gameplay is enjoyable enough to carry you through as you listen to the music and take in the great visual style.

MUSIC/SOUND/VOICE | 9/10

There is actually voice acting here, though mainly for Donkey Kong yelling. If you're talking about audio in Donkey Kong Country though, you're mainly gonna talk about its soundtrack. Beloved by just about each of the 9+ million individuals who bought it and the many more millions who emulated the game through other means, Donkey Kong Country's soundtrack is just as much part of the experience as the gameplay.

Having listened to the soundtrack for hours while playing the game and a couple more hours in addition to that, I can both definitely say that it's a great soundtrack, but also that I wouldn't put it among my favorites on the SNES. The soundtrack has a distinctive quality, which is that pretty much all of the tracks are nice to listen to and there are no real stinkers included, but the soundtrack, for me, doesn't have that many tracks that make me stop and listen to them like I have a tendency to. Games like A Link to the Past, Super Castlevania, Super Metroid, Super Mario World etc. come to mind.

What makes Donkey Kong Country's soundtrack additionally to me though is that I did not at all expect it to be this vibey and play with different themes like it did. I expected cheerful and jolly music throughout while you run around carefree from level to level. As discussed, the game is much harder than I would have anticipated as well, so it's only fitting I guess that from time to time, the music can set an almost dangerous vibe. If you wouldn't agree on dangerous, I'm sure you can agree that some tracks set a mysterious, adventurous and even thoughtful tone from time to time. Then there is a track like Acquatic Ambience, which sounds incredibly soothing and chill instead of hyper and energetic like I would have expected.

In general, the water levels have some of the better tracks in this game, which I'm thankful for, because the levels themselves sucked. So if you do play Donkey Kong Country, I hope the levels themselves don't ruin the songs for you. Overall, a great soundtrack by David Wise, who is another composer I can add to the list of "one's to look out for".

GRAPHICS/ART DESIGN | 10/10

Wow. To call Donkey Kong Country's visuals unique would be an understatement. If you are looking for some of the best looking games of the early 90s, put Donkey Kong Country on your list asap. It's really worth reading up on the technology used to make these sprites come to life, but suffice it to say it's impressive how Rare pulled this off. I have no real working knowledge of this stuff, but if I understand it correctly, they managed to turn 3D geometry into 2D images to use in this game, and whatever way would be correct to explain it, all you need to know is that it looks great.

Environments from the jungles to the mines also look great to extend the vibes and emotions that are put forth by the soundtrack, as well as simply being pleasing to look at. Some locations are repeated here, which is worth pointing out, but thanks to obstacles/challenges constantly varying from level to level, the levels still feel much more distinct than different-looking levels in some other platformers were the challenge stays static.

ATMOSPHERE/IMMERSION | 10/10

I've gone over the vibes and emotions I got from playing the game and how it is way different from what I would have anticipated. Apart from the whimsical, quirky characters that aid Donkey Kong and Diddy Kong in their adventure, there is no storytelling or anything here, so it's important for the music and visuals to set the main tone for this game and if you're like me and have played so many of these cheerful platformers that give off "low stake, made for children" vibes (and I don't mean this negatively, I enjoy them myself to this day), you might feel some fatigue from it from time to time. So to have Donkey Kong Country switch up the tone here and there was a very welcome change and definitely will make the game stick with me longer than some of its contemporaries.

CONTENT | 7/10

The content in this game is very good, but it doesn't feel like it has the budget of a Mario game for example. This is understandable for a video game character that remained dormant for a while, but is noteworthy nonetheless. Donkey Kong has a lack of skills, enemies and objects repeat pretty early on (even though their placement creatively differs regularly) and levels provide lots of fun, but not a lot of depth to them. It has the feeling of the start to something bigger to it in many ways.

LEVEL/MISSION DESIGN | 7/10

This game has a lot of levels. While I'd consider most to be good and some to be excellent, there were some levels I really didn't like. A lot of it has to do with the space given to your character and the timing of button presses. The windows to jump in order to reach a platform or barely just get past an enemy (like those damn zingers) felt too short many times. Two things come to mind especially. First, it's all the levels that include ropes. Half the time I'm struggling getting Donkey Kong to hold on, and the other half of the time where I succeed, I felt like I always would eventually hit my head or my legs on one of the zingers patrolling all the ropes in this world. The other situation where this issue arises is during water levels, where fish are seemingly everywhere and you don't have enough control nor space to maneuver past them reliably, at least as a new player. So if you find yourselves in these situations, best of luck to ya.

Apart from that though, there is more variety here than you'd expect based on the number of enemy types and the limited feature set for Donkey Kong. The barrel levels were fun, the mine cart levels, ditto. Finding secret areas is neat, riding one of the multiple types of animals a la Yoshi is cool too. I thought the mini games weren't as exciting as in Mario games for example, and the last boss was pretty annoying, so there is lots of good and bad here for me, though overall the good definitely wins.

CONCEPT/INNOVATION | 6/10

The innovation here definitely comes from the graphics. Apart from that, the level design and gameplay has similarities to many platformers of its time, and in many ways to Mario as well. It's just that Donkey Kong Country has passion oozing off of it from every direction and also controls well for the most part, which is more than I can say for most platformers in this era of gaming.

REPLAYABILITY | 3/5

After beating this, you can try and find more of the bonus levels to get closer to 101% completion, though as someone who has never done a speedrun or followed the scene, I still don't know what the additional percentages after 100 mean in these games.

PLAYABILITY | 5/5

Works well at all times.

OVERALL | 74/100

A must-play for platforming fans. Some of the most unique visuals for its time, a great soundtrack, fun levels (but also some frustrating ones) and overall just a charming game. I wouldn't call it my 3rd favorite SNES game like its sales would suggest, but I'm positive someone else out there will and I can definitely see their point.

(This is the 89th game in my challenge to go through many known games in chronological order starting in 1990. The spreadsheet/blog is in my bio.)

If you are a fan of video games and of its history in particular, there is nothing I can add to the discourse around the original Doom that hasn't already been said by critics, fans, the original devs, damn politicians even, and you are likely aware how big a deal Doom has been and still is for the video gaming medium. By now, Doom is as old as it is iconic, having released on December 10, 1993 for MS-DOS originally. [Calling it old also makes my palms sweat as I'm typing this, considering how close we are getting to my birth date in terms of this challenge.]

Doom is not the first FPS game ever made, but it certainly is the most influential. I think it would be an apt comparison to think of it the same way you see how Souls-likes are discussed these days. "Soulslike" has become its own genre these days, and while Doom's genre is the FPS genre, for many years after its release, every FPS game would pretty much be looked at as "Doom-clones". Now there is a good reason for this beyond just the first-person view and shooting gameplay, which is that these games would often use the exact same style. UI blocking the bottom row of the screen horizontally, no vertical aim possible, 2.5D sprites and pretty much the same gameplay loop of a boomer / corridor shooter for all of them.

Doom is id Software's next FPS release after Wolfenstein 3D, and it won't take long to notice how much of an improvement Doom is over it in a lot of ways. Doom takes roughly 4-6 hours to finish (if you play the three main episodes) and has stayed relevant for a long time thanks to its mod-friendly nature and the countless fan levels that are available alongside the main game.

STORYTELLING/CHARACTERS | 3/10

According to the manual, which gives you "the story so far", you are a space marine who got transferred to Mars. The "Union Aaresopace Corporation", your contractor, has been conducting secret projects on Mars' two moons, Phobos and Deimos, like creating portals or "gateways" that allowed for gadgets to be thrown into Phobos' portal and come back in Deimos' portal. Before the game starts, what happened is obvious. The experiments went terribly wrong, and demonic creatures started coming out of these portals, which is why you, later to be called "Doomguy", make your way to Phobos alongside a troop of other combatants, who all die while you're ordered to secure the perimeter of the base. Now you are on your own and need to get off the planet, which is where the game starts.

In-game, as soon as you start a new game, you load in with a pistol equipped and can start shooting. If you can appreciate the beauty of games that throw you straight into the action, that's all you need to know I presume. If you want to play games with stories, Doom doesn't offer much apart from the summary of the game's story setup in the manual I have just given, introducing us to an iconic video game character called 'Doomguy' and giving you another block of text at the end of each of the three episodes summarizing your achievement and telling you what happens next. When the first episode ends for example, the text tells you that you are not done yet and need to go into the depths of hell to fight even more demons and find a way out. During gameplay, there is no dialogue, no real environmental storytelling or anything of the sort.

Suffice to say, this is fine and not the reason people fell in love with Doom for.

GAMEPLAY | 14/20

Doom is THE prototypical boomer shooter. Just like in Catacomb 3D and Wolfenstein 3D, you traverse through a labyrinth / maze-like level, shooting every enemy in your way. You can pick up items that give you health, armor, ammo, a map and weapons, as you go. Most items are in your way and are supposed to be found, while some are hidden in hard to reach or completely hidden secret areas.

Each episode you play contains 9 episodes with a boss fight at the end. The main goal of each level is to figure out the way to the exit, the way to which gets more and more complex as levels become more complex as well. The game has a clever way of trying to get you playing for a lot more than one playthrough however by introducing multiple side-goals. Whenever you finish a level, you see the percentage for how many enemies on the level you killed, how many items you collected and how many secret areas you found. On top of that, there is a "par time" for each level. I didn't stay below that par time once, but it's a great little thing that gives you a benchmark for testing your skill.

The gameplay in Doom is a lot more refined than in Wolfenstein 3D thanks to a faster pace, better sound to the weapons and more weapon and enemy variety. You start out with just a pistol, but soon after will find a shotgun that saved my butt on multiple occasions, a chaingun that plows through pistol ammo at a much faster rate, a rocket launcher, a more basic plasma rifle, the BFG 9000 which shoots a plasma ball that destroys everything in sight pretty much and a chainsaw, if you want to get up close and personal. It's a good variety of weapons and depending on the difficulty you set, you will want to or need to switch often, as some weapons are more advantageous in certain situations and because there simply is not enough ammo to stick with one or two weapons throughout. While I found the variety that these weapons and the enemies presented to be satisfying, I would have liked to have a couple more enemy varities in the game to be honest. Overall, I'm not sure what the exact number is, but excluding bosses, there are less than 10 different enemies in the game.

The boss fights themselves could also have been better. There are three in the game. For the first two, all you need to do is dodge projectiles and fire back until the boss dies. For the third one, I didn't find another way to beat it other than to hide behind a structure at the center of the map and shoot it just as its legs came into sight. The boss has undodgeable, lock-on aim and can kill you in a couple seconds once it starts shooting. This game also has the same issue that the other id Software FPS games had, which is that if you die against a boss, you start on the same level but only have the pistol equipped. With what the level offers you in terms of weapons and ammo, it gets pretty tough to kill the boss without bringing all the other weapons and ammo with you from the previous level, so I recommend saving and reloading for every boss fight, if you do die.

Overall though, I had a lot of fun with the gameplay loop in Doom. It felt a lot more refined than Wolfenstein 3D and has aged well enough to still be a fun time today. Its length is also at a solid level and can easily be doubled, tripled or quadrupled through multiple playthroughs on higher difficulty levels and with a bigger focus on completionism.

MUSIC/SOUND/VOICE | 9/10

No voice acting apart from some screams. The sound design in this game is great. While you have to judge this relative to sound in 1993, weapons sound a lot more realistic and have a lot more oomph to them and they sound miles better than the sounds of Wolfenstein. This applies to other sound effects as well, such as simply picking up items, which sounds a lot less obnoxious and discreet here than in Wolfenstein. Doomguy constantly moaning when you press space to interact with objects or walls is kind of an odd choice though.

The soundtrack to this game is great as well, with some pretty iconic tracks included that even someone like me who never played Doom instantly was familiar with, such as the Episode 1 Level 1 track "At Doom's Gate". The soundtrack has a few more bangers like this included, but I realized that it was overall a lot more atmospheric than I expected. I was expecting a bigger emphasis on metal music to emphasize the fast-paced demon-slaying that you are doing on-screen, but it was not the case for many levels. While I don't mind atmospheric sounds at all, I found that some tracks didn't fit so well at times.

GRAPHICS/ART DESIGN | 9/10

What id Software achieved for a first-person game at a time when no one else did is still commendable, even more so since Doom is the game where it visually comes together the best. Unlike Wolfenstein and especially Catacomb, Doom's visuals actually have variety. The game's levels also actually take place outside at times, giving you a view of the horizons. These don't look so great, funnily enough, but it's still something I appreciated. Enemy designs look better, weapon designs look better and the resolution is simply much higher here as well. The UI looks improved and cleaner too, though it's not what you would consider eye candy still. But the visual variety on display here is pretty encouraging after the jump from Catacomb to Wolfenstein wasn't as big as I had hoped. Doom seems like the step in the direction I was more thinking of, and it's a big step at that.

ATMOSPHERE/IMMERSION | 8/10

Thanks to each episode differing in design here, this is the first id Software FPS where there truly is a hint of atmosphere other than just using images from Hitler everywhere in Wolfenstein. You are a badass MF who is on Mars to beat the crap out of demons. That's it. Thanks to the game's visuals and the soundtrack, as well as the gun sounds and fast-paced gameplay, that feeling comes through pretty well.

CONTENT | 9/10

Tons of content here from official content to fan content, which officially found their way into versions of this game. Each main level also offers side-content to try to find, so you can spend a lot of time with this game. If you really click with the gameplay, you probably will.

LEVEL/MISSION DESIGN | 8/10

3 main episodes as well as one additional one. Each episode has 9 levels, the final one being a boss fight. Levels are actually pretty varied here and it will be rare for two levels to feel all that similar to each other in their design. Texture variety can still be improved and still will lead you to get lost here from time to time, but overall levels are complex enough without making it nearly impossible to find your way around. Finding maps for each level also helps a lot.

CONCEPT/INNOVATION | 10/10

Not much to say here about one of the most influential games of all time.

REPLAYABILITY | 4/5

Tons of replay value here after your first playthrough. There are 5 difficulty options, a 4th additional episode, endless fan levels and then there is the completionism aspect to the main episodes, where you can try to get 100% enemy kills, items and secret areas, as well as try to beat the par time. A speedrunner's dream.

PLAYABILITY | 5/5

Works well at all times.

OVERALL | 79/100

Doom is still a lot of fun to play. It didn't age as well as some other games of its time because the FPS genre simply evolved a ton since these early days, but you can still have a fun couple hours with it. I'm glad I played it and if you are someone who is curious about video game history, I'd recommend you to do the same.

Morbid: The Seven Acolytes is an isometric soulslike with a Lovecraftian Horror theme. If you enjoy the lovecraftian genre, there is plenty to like here visually and in terms of the game's lore. The setting, the characters and the items are described in great detail within dozens of entries for those interested in that. The soundtrack is also quite good.

Unfortunately, I didn't quite enjoy the gameplay in this one. It's pretty simple and repetitive but relatively enjoyable when you're fighting normal enemies, but falls apart whenever you are facing bosses. A big issue for bosses is that hitboxes (for both you and the bosses to be fair) are quite unfair. A boss might just slash to its side, but will still hit you even though you are below or above the boss, making it unpredictable at times whether you are within reach of the boss or not. In addition, bosses can have charge attacks, in that they just rush towards you. If you don't know that they will do this and don't preemptively run away far enough, there is nothing you can do and you will get hit. There is no way to dodge, parry or block, you can only be far away from the enemy before they charge up.

As a soulslike, Morbid: The Seven Acolytes unfortunately does lots of things wrong, or at least in ways that I wouldn't dare to do them in this genre. For example, the game has to separate its seven or so areas with loading screens. So if you accidentally walk to the edge of a map and enter a different world, getting back to the previous world will not only take 30+ seconds, but it will also reset all the enemies on the map. While doing so, your health and item charges DO NOT refill, which is quite unfair. It's not gonna happen a lot, but it happened multiple times to me, so worth a mention.

Worse offenses are that resting at "bonfires" triggers a loading screen, maps don't show you where you are exactly (which is an issue because so many areas look the same due to the game's low budget and some areas are pretty big) and bossfights always play the boss entrance cutscene, no matter how many times you attempt it, so you spend 10+ seconds on the first boss for every attempt for example. Some take less time, some probably longer, though I didn't finish the game.

I'd say it's worth checking it out, if you already own it, and perhaps worth it on sale, if the positives about this game sound appealing to you, but it's not a soulslike I would recommend.

I've played Star Wars: Dark Forces on two separate occasions over a year apart now, but each time I start this up, I get to the sewer level and give up after being lost for close to an hour. It was only after I dropped this for good today that I'm hearing that the sewer level is infamous for making players do that. Well, I understand your frustration now, my friends.

That said, the last time I dropped this game, I wanted to play games chronologically starting in 1995. This one released February 15 and was therefore the first on my list. As a retro newcomer of sorts, this game understandably looked very bad and getting to grips with its controls (Page up/down to look down or up respectively, 5 to reset view) and its level design had me uninterested pretty quickly.

This time however, I had already started my challenge well over a year ago in 1990, so I have over 100 retro games and even more time-appropriate expectations before going into this. So how does Dark Forces compare to its contemporaries? Actually pretty well.

Star Wars: Dark Forces takes the FPS / boomer-shooter genre, accepts its fate as being called a doom-clone in every single review made for it at the time, and adds adventure game elements to it, as well as the looking up and down mechanic I talked about in the last paragraph. The adventure game elements consists of actual cutscenes and mission briefings that actually give you story details as well, which is really nice.

In doing so, the game actually brought the genre forward in a meaningful way at the time. In addition, the maze-like levels known to players from Doom I and II at this point are 'mazified' even further by adding additional floors and overall complexity to them not found in boomer shooters before this point. For the most part, I appreciated this. The complexity also means that you can more easily get lost, and I think in that regard the devs misunderstood complex for stupidly obtuse in certain levels, like the aforementioned sewer level. Add to that that in that particular level there is lots of darkness and limited amount of battery power for your NVGs and it can get pretty frustrating unnecessarily. The very low resolution in this game and poor framerate doesn't help matters as you try to figure out where to go.

Everything you can make out despite the resolution does look pretty appealing though, especially if you're into Star Wars. It often actually looks like you're in an enemy base instead of room after room with same-textured wall after wall. Don't get me wrong, I enjoyed Doom plenty, but when talking about bringing something new and improved to the table, Star Wars: Dark Forces does that in the visual design of its levels as well. Enemy design is another part of this. The game obviously has the immediate unmistakeable Star Wars enemies in the Stormtroopers (and Darktroopers, which is a new enemy type introduced here) as well as all the officers and commanders of the Empire you will find waiting for. But that's not all, as there are probably 20 or so enemies in the game in total, from Droids to turrets to those disgusting Dianogas in the sewer level.

Star Wars: Dark Forces will be remastered in February 2024, which means I'll definitely revisit the game at some point next year. If you're into Star Wars and don't mind retro gameplay, this game is definitely going to be a blast to the past that is well worth experiencing with that updated package.

(This is the 53rd game in my challenge to go through many known games in chronological order starting in 1990. The spreadsheet is in my bio.)

Following 1990's 'Gargoyle's Quest', the next release in the 'Ghosts 'n Goblins' series is Super Ghouls 'n Ghosts, the third main entry after the 1985 and 1988 Arcade games. Super Ghouls 'n Ghosts, developed and published by Capcom, is the first among these three to not be released for the arcade at all, instead focusing all efforts on a SNES release on October 4th, 1991 in Japan initially.

As the challenge started in 1990, I didn't play the other two games in the series, but I didn't have to to have heard of 1985's 'Ghosts 'n Goblins', which is infamous for being one of the hardest games of all time. Just by looking at gameplay for that game, I can tell you that 'Super Ghouls 'n Ghosts' for the SNES is a much easier game, though by no means easy.

Regarding the difficulty, there is a pretty noticeable difference in the NA and Europe versions. The European version is much simpler due to fewer enemies on screen, fewer of the harder enemies and, from what I can tell, less hits needed to take them out. Apart from the lower difficulty, this helps combat the slowdown effect that is more common in the USA version. A slowdown, for those who don't know, is literally that, the game slowing down. This happens when there are many sprites and/or special effects on-screen at the same time as, in this case for the SNES, it pushes the console to its limits. In the European version, I've experienced slowdown only once, and that was very brief. So if you want to play the game and are looking for an easier time, go with the European version.

Accessibility: I might lead off with this one from here on out for all games that have any sort of accessibility options, as those are still not common at all in 1991. For this game, as it is not originally designed for the Arcade I assume, there are some pretty nice options to make the experience even easier / more bearable for yourself. First, there are four difficulty levels, from beginner to professional. Higher difficulties increase enemy amount, boss health, how many money bags you need to collect to gain additional continues and a few other things I haven't noticed. In addition, you can choose the amount of lives you have from 1 to 9. Add to both of these that there is a checkpoint system and all this definitely makes the game much easier than the vanilla experience.

STORYTELLING/CHARACTERS | 2/10

Once again, you are knight Arthur. The setting for this one is described in the manual only. It's titled 'A Knight's Quest'.

"All hail, dauntless knight Arthur! Years ago you quelled the terrifying phantoms of the Ghoul Realm [...] and rescued Princess Guinevere. But now the kingdom is shrouded under an eerie spell. Sardius, the Emperor of Evil, has snatched Princess Guinevere [...]"

It's your typical old-school platformer sequel storyline set-up. Same things happened again, you must save everyone again. It's fine, you didn't play a game like this for the story back then.

In-game, the opening has Arthur and Guinevere in arms in her castle, as someone approaches through the large window behind them. It's Sardius, who kidnaps Princess Guinevere and flies off. Now you must go through 8 levels to defeat Sardius and get the Princess back. But there is a catch. Like is typical for this series, you don't go through the levels just once to win. Once you go through them for the first time, the Princess tells you that she was wearing a powerful bracelet. That bracelet was the reason she was kidnapped and using it is the only way you defeat Sardius. Luckily, she dropped it whilst kidnapped, so you gotta go through all levels and find it. That's the only dialogue in the game, so you're really not playing it for the story, but the game gets a bonus point for having continuity with its main character and, albeit just a tiny bit, for adding to its lore.

GAMEPLAY | 12/20

Let's compare some of this to 1985's 'Ghosts n' Goblins' here to show you where this game changed and, usually, improved.

You control knight Arthur in a 2D platformer where you kill enemies with some sort of a projectile whilst jumping from platform to platform to avoid falling to your demise. There are 8 total levels and a boss at the end of each level. Apart from throwing your projectiles (lance, dagger, crossbow, scythe, torch, axe, tri-blade - yes, these all act as projectiles here), you can double jump and crouch, which I don't think you could do in the NES title.

You have two hit points, which is unchanged from the original, so get hit twice and you die. You either are sent back to the start or, if you've made it far enough, start at a check-point. Each level has a 5 minute time limit, something I never had an issue with. You either die or make it in time.

Many enemies are the same from the NES title, and act the same. Most infamously, there is the "Red Arremer Ace", the red devil-like creature that constantly avoids your hits and swoops down on you out of nowhere. This thing is just as annoying here as in the NES game, because the worst part is, if you don't kill it, it will follow you until you do. Plus, depending on the weapon you got - and plenty of them suck - it will take multiple hits to die, but you're likely going to get hit at least once before you get it down, and often enough twice, which, again, means you die. Horrible little creature.

Gameplay on the easier difficulty levels is mostly controlling well, but there are some issues you will have to live with no matter how many enemies are on screen. For example, jumps can be very hard to control sometimes, a frustration that is exacerbated by the fact that platforms you need to jump on are very small sometimes. Plus, you need to choose the direction you want to jump in while you press jump. No changing direction mid-air, so you can imagine how frustrating that is. On top of that, there are ladders you can climb here. For some reason, you need to hold 'Up' while climbing for much longer than the ladder appears to be long, as your character is stuck in an animation at the top of the ladder for a good second before he stands upright. This second is usually vital as some sort of enemy or obstacle is often placed near the top of ladders. And if you are on top of a ladder and just want to crouch, to for example break open a chest next to it, too bad, your character will start climbing down the ladder instead.

Boss fights in this one, for the most part, are surprisingly easy. Especially if you get the right weapons into the boss fight, you can make a lot of damage quickly.

There are some unique environmental challenges to each level, which I enjoyed. In the first, you need to stand on top of the right platforms while a wave forms, otherwise it will take you out. In another, an avalanche approaches and can throw you to the start of the area, so you need to climb ladders or stand on a platform above that the avalanche can't reach to avoid that. There are some other things like that, which adds to the variety in gameplay, which otherwise isn't all too varied but mostly enjoyable.

The end game condition being that you have to find a bracelet does tank the overall fun factor however, because to get it, you need to open chest after chest without getting hit once until you can upgrade to the golden armor, at which point one of the next chests will reveal the bracelet. Get hit once and you lose your armor and need to keep opening chest after chest once again, because chest #1 gives you iron armor, then a random number of chests later you'll find emerald armor and after another random number of chests later you'll find the gold armor, so this takes a while.

MUSIC/SOUND/VOICE | 7/10

No voice acting. The sound design is fairly average, though with a few sound effects that are odd picks. For example, destroying stone statues gives off the sound of glass breaking. The soundtrack overall is quite fitting with the overall atmosphere that is present here, with some spooky tracks to enhance the immersion. Wouldn't place the OST among the greats, but fits the game well.

GRAPHICS/ART DESIGN | 8/10

Compared to the NES game, this is a great jump in graphical quality in pretty much every aspect. Not a surprise given the jump to the SNES, but this definitely gives off sequel vibes just based on that. The devs did a great job in the enemy design and put plenty of effort in animations to make the game feel much more lively. A nice touch is that your health is indicated by what you're wearing. Wearing armor means you can get hit once without dying.

The first 5 levels have a pretty unique design and weather conditions. Stage 6 to 8 all play in Sardius castle and look similar.

ATMOSPHERE | 7/10

A spooky atmosphere is present throughout. Though the fact that you walk around in your underwear when one hit away from death is kind of an odd pick as it works contra to the atmosphere the game is going for otherwise.

CONTENT | 6/10

The game is not overly long, and most of the duration comes from the trial and error due to the difficulty. Apart from that, there is a slightly average amount of content here for a platformer, with more weapons than usual, more enemy variety than usual and different types of environmental challenges.

LEVEL/MISSION DESIGN | 5/10

Of the eight levels in this game, the final level is just the boss fight with Sardius, the two preceding ones are relatively similar (and one is very short) and then you have five that are unique in design. The mission design for these is pretty basic. Go through a level, defeat the boss at the end to move forward. The time limit present is not that relevant and I never had any issues with it. Having to go through the same levels with a slight increase in difficulty again after going through them once already is something I personally didn't necessarily enjoy, but your experience might vary there.

CONCEPT/INNOVATION | 4/10

It's pretty much the same game compared to the other ones. The most innovative part about this game is the fact that it was made much more accessible to players of lower skill.

REPLAYABILITY | 3/5

Apart from trying to beat your high score and trying to win with higher lives selected, you can also try to win the game on higher difficulty levels.

PLAYABILITY | 5/5

The game worked well at all times. You'll experience a bit of slowdown, if you play the US version, so I'd recommend the European one.

OVERALL | 59/100

A very skippable game. It doesn't take advantage of the SNES at all from a graphical and technical standpoint, it's a much worse version than the one for the Arcades, it's in general a rather basic platformer, very repetitive and lacks features. Not the worst game of the year, but a Top 5 contender.

These "charming Indie(-style) platforming-adventure games" (like Rime, Gris, Aer, or even Journey) are not usually quite for me. The feeling the devs would like you to feel whilst playing these games don't usually bubble up inside me when I play these, even though I certainly can and do become emotional when I play video games. If you're like me and are still curious about Jusant, here is what I thought. If you're the opposite, I'd just disregard this review and read some of the other ones you find.

I booted up Jusant because I had a few days of Xbox Game Pass left and read multiple positive reviews (both by critics and players) about it. It's quite short at 3-4 hours (though it took me 5, maybe because I read every letter), so why not just play through it in an afternoon or two.

Ultimately, my experience with Jusant was pretty much the same as with the games I've described above, though closer to Journey and Gris than Aer and Rime (which is to say I thought it was above average in its category of games). Gameplay was enjoyable, I like the visuals and the soundtrack has some good songs in it, but the payoff to both the main story and the side story told in letters were both 'meh' because despite heavy lore dumps in letters at times, a lot of questions remain unanswered about this world. So much so that I find it hard to come to my own conclusion as to what happens after the ending, which is something many games ask you to do and usually feel satisfactory in doing so.

To go into it a bit more in-depth, gameplay consists of two things. The main part, which is climbing. You are an unnamed wanderer who starts close to the Sand Plains, which, to my understanding, is the bottom part of this so called "Tower" that you are about to ascend. You reach the "Low Tide" area, where you find some letters that clue you in on the story. From there, you start climbing upwards, finding some of the different areas that the letters previously described to you.

Each of these areas present you with additional climbing challenges, some of which remain for the rest of your playthrough and some of which are region-specific. For example, in the heat your stamina drains faster and roots of a plant wilt and disappear after a short while.

Climbing was fun enough for the duration of the game. It was not challenging but also not just a matter of pressing RT and LT all the time until the end. I've seen some call it meditative and, for the most part, I'd agree with that.

The other part of the gameplay is the collectibles. There are four or five things you can collect in this game: Letters, cairns which you can complete by adding a stone on top, frescos which you can light up, shells which you can listen to and altars which you can turn. The frescos look different, the shells give you different sounds each time and the letters obviously have differing contents, but as you can perhaps tell, these tasks are repetitive and don't serve a lot of purpose other than being busy work for achievement hunters.

The frescos look differently and have poems attached, which might impress you if you're into poems. I'm not a poems person myself. The shell sounds are OK but I didn't feel like there being 0 people in this tower besides you was a particularly good idea, so the shell sounds to replace them wasn't something I thought was sufficient to add to the game's atmosphere.

Finally, the letters consist of two types. There are Bianca's letters, which tell the story of a girl who leaves her home at a young age to join an expedition to the clouds and logs her progress. The second type consists of letters by past inhabitants of the homes you find these attached to and their worries, as well as newspaper articles to clue you in on the lore. While it helped in that final aspect, I didn't find most of these letters interesting and Bianca's story to not be worth the 15 minutes or so I've spent reading it.

The fate of the people in the tower is a sad thing for sure, but without really knowing much about the circumstances of them nor your character, I can't really say I knew enough to be able to care much about it all.

Despite that, the visuals, the climbing gameplay and the calm nature of it were enough to make this an enjoyable couple hours for me. You can (and should) avoid the non-letter and perhaps even shell and fresco side activities though, because they don't add much to the experience other than making it take longer.

(This is the 15th game in my challenge to go through many known games in chronological order starting in 1990. The spreadsheet is in my bio.)

Metal Gear 2: Solid Snake (released on July 20, 1990 in Japan only - available in NA/EU through MGS3: Subsistence for PS2) is the first Metal Gear game I have actually played and beaten, even though I've played a bit of MGS1, 3 and dozens of hours of MGS 5. I've abandoned those for various reasons over the years, mostly due to being distracted by other games and/or finding them too difficult (tried to play without guides), but I do plan on going through the entire series over the next few years.

For today, I am happy to say that the second MSX Metal Gear game made by Hideo Kojima has been beaten. It took me roughly 7 hours and I did use a guide whenever I didn't know what to do, and in my opinion, you will have a hard time beating this game without one. The gameplay mechanics themselves will not be a problem, but there are multiple instances where (1) you need an item for a boss that is very easy to miss and (2) you need to backtrack to an area and it can be hard to make out where you need to go. During those backtracking parts, often you will probably figure it out if you just check every available door but I decided to take a look at the guide whenever it took me about 10 minutes of looking around without being able to figure out my next move.

Sometimes the answer to a puzzle can be pretty convoluted as well. In one part of the game, an area is locked off by lasers. A guard is at that spot as well. There is a little shack next to it, and later on you find a keycard that allows you to enter. A few children in there tell you that "the lasers are turned off at night": There is no traditional day & night system in this game, so you can't just wait for it to be night. No, instead you have to find something elsewhere, figure out to use it near the guard, wait a few seconds for the guard cutscene to trigger, which makes him then turn off the lasers. You can get it eventually thanks to to the tips by the children, but sometimes it gets more complicated with fewer tips, at which point checking a guide is almost a must.

If you don't mind using guides a few times here and there, great, because the game is among the better ones you will get to play in 1990 and offers a fun way to spend a few afternoons. It improved on basically everything compared to the first Metal Gear game by Kojima. Plus, as I understand it, it's canon to the Metal Gear universe and much of what MG2 does is apparently repeated in some way or another in MGS1 and 2, both in gameplay and story.

More on the game in detail below.

____________

STORYTELLING
The game starts with a lengthy cut scene that briefly summarizes the plot of the first game and the setting for this one. After conflict between large nations like Russia, the USA and China started to settle down, a new nuclear threat emerged in 1999, the year this game is set in (4 years after the previous one). The country is called "Zanzibar Land", which arms itself with nuclear weapons and stars invading nearby countries.

In addition to this, there is an ongoing oil crisis (the game's premise and its story themes are evidently still relevant today). A Czech biologist named Kio Marv invents "Oilix" a microbe that synthesizes petroleum, and Zanzibar Land kidnap him to gain military superiority through a combination of nuclear weapons and Oilix.

Solid Snake receives his mission by Foxhound, a special forces squad, to sneak into Zanzibar Land and rescue Kio Marv. Of course, there is a nuclear weapon called "Metal Gear" to worry about as well, as Zanzibarland are mass-producing Metal Gear units.

The beauty of this story is manifold, though you won't necessarily fall in love with the in-game plot itself. It works well, it includes plot twists and plenty of both sad and thoughtful moments. Considering that this is a video game from 1990 however, it won't blow your socks off at this day and age. What I really appreciated, however, was the attention to detail.

If you look at the manual of this game, it shows you a biography of each relevant character (did you know Snake speaks 6 languages?). It lists all basic information about Zanzibar Land (population: 40,000), it even explains what kind of training Foxhound aspirants need to go through, what gear they wear during missions and what Foxhound itself even is. The game then mentions some of this information during radio conversations, some optional, some mandatory.

The radio/codec in general is a great feature because it has a ton of immersive uses that are both helpful and engaging. Each character has their own frequency and you can ring them to partake in optional conversations, which don't always trigger depending on what situation Snake finds himself in. But when they do, you can ring Holly to learn more about Zanzibar Land and your environment. You can ring Roy Campbell, your commander, to get more information about your mission and some helpful tips. You can call Kazuhira Miller, who often does meta commentary on "not drinking too much soda when playing" or "not playing within 30 minutes of eating" (not very immersive, but humorous/actually interesting). You can also call Johan Jacobsen to get some tips whenever animals are involved. This system gets fleshed out in future entries but this game is a big step in the right direction in that regard.

Throughout the game, you will meet characters either to rescue them or to help them (or for them to help you) and each time you do, there is an engaging conversation that you can follow along. One such conversation that was pretty memorable happened between Snake and Gustava. While waiting, both literally sat down and just talked about Gustava's past, why she became involved with the STB and about the only man she ever fell in love with. I love this sort of stuff and it helps make the bigger moments in the game's story hit that much more.

Most impressive about the story in this game has got to be its meta commentary on war. It is barebones compared to what I know future games delve into, but there is still plenty of thoughtful stuff here about how soldiers are pawns of leaders who don't care about them, about how some children who are saved from battlefields are simply trained to be put back into the battlefield and about how some soldiers don't have a life worth living outside of the battlefield, so they may as well die on it. It gives the "evil" antagonists a "motivation" for their actions unlike what you will see in almost any other game, where the simple goal is to reign over the world, whereas here, it goes way beyond that.

I'm probably making the story out to be way more than it actually is, but I truly do find the attention to detail and the themes to be impressive features of this game and something that obviously stuck around big time in future iterations.

GAMEPLAY
Where to start? You play Solid Snake, a special ops soldier, and have to sneak into Zanzibar Land to find Dr. Kio Marv. When you start the game, your are equipped with your radio to contact a few individuals who will help you. You immediately get access to a handgun, some rations (healing items) and you obviously have your next-level sneaking abilities.

The game has a LIFE bar that increases each time you defeat a boss. Boss fights sometimes occur within minutes of each other, sometimes you don't fight one for over an hour. There are close to 10 in total and are pretty varied. You fight a chopper, a Running Man that just keeps running away whilst the room fills up with toxic gas, a Ninja that throws stars and teleports and of course a Metal Gear. They are pretty simple once you know what to do and are equipped for them. Often, you can simply tank their damage and just eat Rations while you fire back until they die.

To aid you with your mission, there is a RADAR for the first time in the series. It is a 3x3 screen that shows each adjacent screen and marks enemies and yourself as dots. It is pretty primitive, in that it doesn't actually show which direction the enemies are facing, so it often happened at first that I walked into a screen and immediately alerted the guards because they were staring into my direction. Later on I figured out to let the enemies walk the other direction first, at which point I obviously knew which way they were facing.

Guards in this game have a bigger field of view compared to the previous game (45°) and sometimes stand still and turn there gaze to the left or right. In addition, there are multiple different floors in this game, some that squeak when you walk over them, which alerts the guards and makes them look around. For moments like these, you can crawl, which doesn't make any noise. Plus, you can hide under stuff, either to move past enemies yourself or hide until they move past you.

There are some sections where a room is dark (you get Night Vision goggles), where a room fills with Toxic Gas (Gas Mask) or mines are on the floor (crawl over them to pick them up and/or use a Mine Detector). The situations you find yourself in are plentiful and there is a safe and easy solution to everything. The tough part is finding them sometimes.

The big gameplay loop you have here is in finding Key Cards, which help you unlock areas that previously were inaccessible. There are 9 Key Cards and after you find 3, you can find a Key Card that combines them all (Red Card, Blue Card, Green Card). There are plenty of areas with multiple doors which all require a different key card to unlock, which is kind of annoying. You open a door with Key Card 4, then have to use Key Card 2 for the next one and Key Card 6 for the other one.

Overall, the depth in gameplay is definitely above anything other than some RPGs of the time probably, and it's a lot of fun, even today.

MUSIC/SOUND/VOICE
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No voice acting. I liked the sound design, while I found the soundtrack to range from OK to very good. The quality of the soundtrack really shined whenever the game entered action or story heavy scenes, while some of the overworld themes were catchy as well. I really enjoyed the intro theme too.

GRAPHICS/ART DESIGN
Metal Gear 2 certainly looks good for a 1990 game. It is much improved compared to Metal Gear in both use of colors and variety of locations. There is also more detail within locations, like the sewers, the "forest" area (not sure what the official name was), the swamps and then smaller locations like an infirmary, dining rooms etc.

ATMOSPHERE
I found this game to have fitting atmosphere throughout, but the game technically was obviously pretty limited in what it could do. It didn't help the setting that you spend like an hour on elevators it felt like, and I also found some things off putting and too game-y, like the fact that kids were just running around in random rooms waiting to give you tips on how to progress.

CONTENT
For a playthrough without the use of a guide, you are looking at a game that is about 10-15 hours long. If you use a guide here and there, you're looking at 6-8 hours, which for games of this time that are not RPGs or endless games is in my opinion the perfect length. Games at this time simply weren't feature rich or technically able enough to provide a lot of content that is limited in repetition.

I don't think I would necessarily have been to keen on spending ~$50 per game back in the day for this length, but the shorter length does a lot of good to the enjoyment of the game if we disregard that initial price tag.

There is a lot of fun stealth gameplay here that offers enough variety in how to approach things thanks to a multitude of stealth mechanics and weaponry. There is enough here that even a second playthrough may be worth it to you to approach some scenarios slightly differently. It's not like you can take different routes to get to the same destination - the game is pretty linear in that regard - but the moment to moment action can definitely easily be switched up a little bit.

There is some backtracking and as mentioned many times, you will likely need to use a guide here and there unless you're very patient, but Metal Gear 2 offers the best mix of quality and quantity of all 15 games I have played of 1990 up to this point.

Once you beat the game, there is a "boss rush" mode that unlocks as an additional mode.

LEVEL/MISSION DESIGN
There are a few main areas (two different buildings, forest/swamp area, desert) and the game asks you to backtrack a lot, but each time you do, you are able to enter new areas that are unlocked by acquiring a key card. Buildings have multiple doors and floors that require different key cards (there are 9) and each time you enter a new area within an area, there is enough of a different stylistically that it doesn't really feel repetitive. Often there are new stealth challenges added as well, but it could have definitely been much more difficult in that regard.

You can obviously alert guards, but it isn't really that punishing, especially on Easy difficulty. You can simply go to the next screen and hide underneath something and the guards will disappear without being on "semi-alert" status or something like that like they do in future games.

The structure of this game is pretty much the same throughout, and it's a fun structure, so I don't have too much to say about that. You get your mission to go to Area X, on your way you find key items hidden in specific rooms, you sometimes gotta piece together which item you need to use at which point, and then you fight a boss to progress further. It all works well.

One thing I didn't like was how key items were sometimes hidden somewhere and totally missable. Some bosses for example can only be hurt with one specific weapon, like the chopper early on, so I didn't particularly enjoy showing up to that one unable to do any damage. Often, once you do find the item, defeating them is rather simple.

So yeah, overall pretty good stuff with that small complaint.

CONCEPT/INNOVATION
Absolutely one of the more innovative games I've seen so far and it introduced many mechanics that were still in use when MGS1 released 8 years later. This game had everything you would want from a sequel. Bigger field of view for enemies makes stealth a bit more difficult, but the game offers a lot more "toys" for the player in terms of equipment, plus you can sneak and hide underneath stuff, and there is a lot more detail in the game's story telling.

REPLAYABILITY
There are two areas that will make this game slightly more replayable. There is a lot of equipment that I didn't use in my first playthrough. First, because I played it on easy (only available through MGS 3: Subsistence) and second, because there really are so many items and not all are necessary to be successful. There is a blanket for example that you can hide under, which I didn't use. Mice and cold medicine are other items that come to mind as one's I didn't require, to a point where I don't even know what cold medicine might be usable for. There are lots of other items like that which were in my inventory until the game was beaten.

The second area that allows for a little replayability are the radio conversations. There are dozens of optional conversations that you can try to find and I'm sure I didn't get to listen to all of them. It's nothing compared to what future games will offer, but considering the issue of memory limitations was pretty big at the time, it's impressive to see this much room put aside for optional conversations that offer (1) additional lore about the world and its inhabitants, (2) meta commentary and (3) humorous interactions.

Apart from this, you will experience everything in a singular playthrough.

PLAYABILITY
The game worked well at all times.

OVERALL
So far, Metal Gear 2: Solid Snake was definitely the best game I have played that released in 1990. Impressive amount of features with limited filler to pad play time, by far the most story telling and character development, limited frustration apart from not knowing where to go or what to do a few times and definitely a step in the right direction for video games. I think it's unlikely that I will manage to hold off from playing MGS1 all the way until I reach 1998, but I'll try, just to really build up that anticipation.

WHAT THEY SAID AT THE TIME
Nothing here since it didn't release outside of Japan until 2005.

Loom is a point & click adventure game initially released in January 1990 for MS-DOS by LucasArts using the SCUMM engine, with Brian Moriarty as its Designer. There are multiple versions for this game, but the initial release was on a floppy disk and had 16-color EGA graphics with no voice acting, while the version that I played, the "Talkie" version, released in 1992 on CD with 256-color VGA graphics. This version includes voice acting, but some scenes are censored and there are some cuts as far as conversation close-ups and puzzles with multiple solutions go.

There is also a version that came out for the Japanese FM-Towns in 1991 which many fans consider to be the "definitive version", while Brian Moriarty himself considers the initial EGA version to be the "real" edition. If you want to play the game for yourself, I can say the 1992 version compared to the 1990 version will not drastically alter your opinion of the game, so if you value VGA graphics and voice acting, I would go with that.

Anyway, what's this game about?: In Loom, you play Bobbin Threadbare, a 17-year-old who is part of the "Weaver's Guild", a group of people who became masters of woven fabric and over time gained the ability to weave "patterns of influence into the very fabric of reality", meaning they could actually change the color of something, turn invisible and heal, among other things. In this world, many other Guilds that focus on a singular craft exist and the Weavers Guild was persecuted for using "witchcraft", resulting in their escape to an island that became their new home, Loom, called after their guild symbol, a loom (an apparatus for making fabric).

Events unfold and Bobbin Threadbare is born, however in unforeseen circumstances, and the loom's pattern is thrown into chaos as a result. This means that throughout his life, Bobbin is not allowed to learn the Guild's ability to weave, since he is seen as the one who has cursed the guild. He is raised by "Dame Hetchel", an old serving woman, who in secret teaches Bobbin the basics of weaving and when Bobbin turns 17 and the story starts, it is her who gives him his mission.

At the start of the game, the Elders summon Bobbin to the Sanctuary to determine his fate. As he arrives, he sees how the Elders punish Dame Hetchel. They turn her into an egg, only for a swan to crash into the room from a window and turn all the Elders into swans as well. The Elders shout that this is all Bobbin's fault as they fly off to who knows where.
This is where the actual gameplay begins. One of the elders dropped his "distaff" (a stick to which wool is wound for spinning), and Dame Hetchel is still in the room as an egg. You pick up the distaff, point it to the egg, and four notes start playing. You repeat this four-note pattern (called a "draft), and the egg starts to hatch ("open"). Out comes Dame Hetchel as a cygnet (young swan) and tells Bobbin about his mission, about how the "Third Shadow" will cover the world and why he has to find the swans.

So to summarize, you play Bobbing Threadbane, something is wrong with the "loom" and the Elders of your guild blame you. You are left on your own when all Elders are turned into swans and leave the island that you live in, so you pick up the distaff and have to use the "Weaving ability/magic" to try and find the flock and try to stop the world to be covered by the Third Shadow.

This is where Loom is very different to pretty much all other graphical adventures of its time. Instead of an interface with a bunch of verbs and an inventory to store items, you are solely equipped with the distaff. The distaff shows up horizontally on the interface and every few inches of it make up one sound, each being higher than the next. For each "draft" (magical ability), you need to figure out the corresponding four-note sound. For opening something, this sound turns out to be "E-C-E-D". Later on for example, you find for trees with holes in them, and each tree you click presents you with one note. Once you get all four, you have a draft. You don't know what the draft is for until you actually successfully tried it on something. This particular one for example was used to "twist sth". As you progress further and further, you unlock more and more notes on your distaff, which you need to do to be able to play some of the more advanced drafts which may use letters (like "A") that you are not skilled enough to play.

But with that, let's move over to my rating system to discuss all aspects of this game individually.

STORYTELLING: Throughout the story in this game, which only takes about 3-4 hours depending on the difficulty you pick (more on that in a bit), you visit many different areas and meet different Guilds like the Blacksmiths Guild or the Shepherds Guild. You visit the Forge, the home of the Blacksmiths, Crystalgard, the headquarters of the Guild of Glassmakers and a cathedral, home of the Guild of Clerics, among many other locations. The world created for this game overall is very unique and to know that this is not just a playground for your main character but rather a world that is actually alive definitely aids the telling of stories concerning both the main quest and of simple side stories. For each Guild you stumble upon, you meet one or multiple characters who tell you what their kind is like, what kind of problems ail them and what goals they pursue. The Glassmakers for example are building a massive Sythe atop the Crystalgard. For what purpose?

The main story that ties all this together is an interesting, yet convoluted one that falls victim to the use of a lot of "this happens so that this can happen" methods of storytelling and especially scenes that should call for urgency just don't and the pacing of it all can fall a bit flat as a result. For example, in the final showdown with Chaos, instead of taking your distaff, with which you are pretty much incompetent, and forcing you to teach him the ways, he just stands there until you do something. Worst of all, the game has been made with a trilogy in mind, and according to Brian Moriarty himself, both himself and others just wanted to do something else after Loom was finished, and they just never got back to it. So expect a cliffhanger ending and change your plans of playing this game if that bothers you. It probably should, but the game is worth experiencing nevertheless I think.

The voice acting in the versions that include it is actually much much better than I would have expected and while the main character's voice actor made him sound a bit whiny throughout, the cast overall did a great job. I played the first chapter without voice first and definitely am glad that I played the voiced version afterwards.

Unlike many other LucasArts adventure games of its time, Loom is more serious and has few humorous elements included (though they are certainly there). As someone who has tried some Monkey Island but didn't finish any of their games prior to Loom, I can say that I prefer the more humorous games and graphical adventures with often odd solutions to puzzles definitely fit the "Comedy" category more.

GAMEPLAY: There is a "Book of Patterns" that comes with your copy of the game, if you indeed do want to buy a copy for $100+ these days. For everyone else, there is the manual online which includes it, and while it's not necessary to be used in my version of the game, the initial release does have a puzzle right at the start that is unsolvable without the manual in hand. Otherwise, the "book" lists a bunch of drafts (spells) and you can use it to write down the notes that the game gives you. Otherwise, it's recommended to write down the notes elsewhere, because the first draft you learn (open) will be needed to solve puzzles in the final third of the game, and writing down is the only option to access it. Almost all drafts are randomized for each playthrough, so you can't look up the notes online either.

Apart from using drafts, there isn't really much gameplay in this game. You walk around, you find items to click on and you either are rewarded with a new draft or you can try to use known drafts on it. Some drafts I didn't really find any use for, so I wonder if they were a) a distraction or b) used for optional puzzles, but the devs found a creative use for most drafts at least twice and sometimes, the game also requires you to think outside the box. How? You learn the draft "twist". But what about when you have to untwist something? In that case, try the draft backwards.

Spelling out a draft can take quite a while, so if you try multiple ones at something to guess the puzzle solution, it can take you a few minutes to go through all of them. This is nothing unusual for games of its time but with no skip animation button it did get boring after a while to wait and see what happens. Being more skilled at these games than me might mean you figure these puzzles out quicker than me though and limit your amount of unsuccessful attempts.

Finally, when you start the game, there are 3 difficulty levels. PRACTICE, which shows you the letters for each note, which note you hear and it also spells out all four letters at the end. STANDARD, which also shows letters and marks the note you hear, but it doesn't spell it out in the end. It's pretty much the same difficulty level though. EXPERT, which neither shows letters nor which part of the distaff the note comes from, meaning you have to figure out which part of the distaff makes which noise at first and then make out those notes from hearing. It's definitely much harder than the other two difficulties but also more than doable.

MUSIC/SOUND/VOICE: The voice acting is very good. I didn't quite warm up to the voice of the main character, but the rest did a fine job. Especially later on in the game, you could hear the end of the previous dialogue line cutting into the next dialogue line, which got more and more notable right into the finale.

The game's sound design is overall good but has similar issues. When the four notes of a draft play for example, one or more of the note sounds are cut off for a split second almost every time.

The soundtrack has a mystical and classical theme and from what I've read online, it's highly regarded and a big part of the experience for many. It definitely is a big part in enhancing the experience, I agree, but I wasn't quite enamored with it. Sound cutting issues were present here as well and while I understand music was limited to the most important moments due to technical limitations, it didn't help my experience when 90% of the game was played without any music in the background. Overall, it's a solid and fitting soundtrack but the times have raised expectations on what to expect there for sure.

GRAPHICS/ART DESIGN: Loom received top or near-top grades for its graphics at the time and even today its sophisticated art design and its colorful, varied landscapes stand out over many other games coming out in and around 1990.

ATMOSPHERE: Music, sound and graphics work well in tandem with the game's lore and world building to create an atmospheric adventure, however the rarely used music due to the technical limitations at the time does take away from the atmosphere, especially whenever you are stuck on a particular puzzle and spend minutes without any sound, whether its from the soundtrack or from the musical notes coming out of the distaff.

CONTENT: There isn't that much here outside of the main story, which takes 3-4 hours to beat, but considering the premise of this game, it works in its favor that the game is shorter than comparable graphical adventures.

LEVEL/MISSION DESIGN: Overall the structure in this game works well, but at times the places you find the necessary drafts from to progress seem pretty random. In addition, the final chapter seems rushed and at least to me, the puzzle solutions seemed unintuitive.

CONCEPT/INNOVATION: The distaff being the key component is certainly unique. I think it's fair to say that it's unlikely that you've played any game quite like Loom. It didn't really stick as a concept, ostensibly, but it shows developers desire to innovate at the time where a more traditional adventure would have been a safer bet. Plus, at worst it makes Loom stand out, since the unique gameplay feature is not something that I would call "bad" at all. The game sold over half a million copies all told from what I've read, so it wasn't a commercial failure either.

REPLAYABILITY: You can replay it once to get a better grasp of the plot and especially to try the game on expert if you played your first playthrough on PRACTICE/STANDARD, but there isn't much replayability beyond that.

PLAYABILITY: The game works fine overall and is completely playable.

OVERALL: You should have probably already played this game if you're a fan of point & click adventures, especially of this day and age. Unlike many other games from this time period, this one does not require you to go through magazine or internet tips on how to solve puzzles in order to complete it. Even the manual says that the devs created this game in a way that they wanted you to complete and fully experience it, so you won't be stuck for too long at any particular puzzle. And that's good, because even if the story is not as mesmerizing today as it might have been in the early 90s, it's still one worth telling and one that a faster pace, by nature of the player being stuck at puzzles far less, does a lot of good.

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WHAT THEY SAID AT THE TIME:

- "Unknown Gamer" from the GamePro Issue 41 (Dec 92): "Loom's magic comes mainly from its highly creative and original use of music"
- "Leslie Mizell" from the Game Player's Issue 12 Vol. 2 Nr. 6 (June 90): "[...] sit back and watch the spellbinding graphics as the story unfolds."

(This is the 113th game in my challenge to go through many known games in chronological order starting in 1990. The spreadsheet/blog is in my bio.)

Donkey Kong Country 2: Diddy's Kong Quest came out pretty much exactly a year after the original set the SNES world on fire. Because of that, it's actually impressive how creatively designed the levels are, how beautifully composed the soundtrack is and how well the game flows at many times.

Even still, I caught myself not quite enjoying this as much as it felt like I should at every second. I truly found myself controlling Diddy Kong and wondering "Do I not like platformers that much?". I can't say I grew up with platformers, though I did play many hours playing Super Mario Bros. 3 and both World games as a child. So maybe there is some truth to that. But then again, replaying Super Mario World about a year ago was a lot of fun.

Then I thought about Mega Man. About Sonic. About Kirby. About Wario. I enjoyed their platformer games for what they were (besides Mega Man, me and that series just isn't going to work out unfortunately) but didn't fall in love with any of them despite the praise most of the games have gotten. And it's a similar story with Donkey Kong Country 1 and 2. I love their visual style and their soundtracks. I can appreciate the gameplay and level design for what they are. But the loop just isn't all that fun to me relative to how it probably should be.

So I'm leaving these thoughts here just to catalogue the game as part of the challenge I'm doing, and if you're someone like me who is on the fence about the platforming genre, maybe you just find someone who shares your gaming tastes.

If I had to guess what the issue is, it's probably the fact that platformers are based on quick reaction times and the patience to learn patterns and repeat them for success. As a 26 year old, I feel like that's not the kind of stuff I can let myself be lured into anymore. With that comes the lack of patience for failure that I perceive comes cheaply, which is kind of what I felt in this game, more so than in the original Donkey Kong Country, though only by a little bit. Your character is pretty large compared to the overall screen, and your field of view is small as a result. Which means a lot of the time, I'd get hit by a character just appearing at the edge of the screen, leaving me with a small window to react. Another example are the jumps, which you have to execute within a small window because your characters can't jump all that far, even while running, leading me to fall to my death all too often by an inch.

Overall, it's a game I probably would love, similar to early Super Mario platformers, if I had played it as a kid and learned a lot of the patterns and secrets over dozens of hours of dying easy deaths, but Donkey Kong Country 2: Diddy's Kong Quest did not have that same appeal to today's me unfortunately.

I'll leave the review with this. If you're looking for retro platformers, Donkey Kong Country 1 and 2 are undoubtedly among the best gaming had to offer at the time. The way I play games these days just doesn't seem to work with these platformers all that well.

(This is the 57th game in my challenge to go through many known games in chronological order starting in 1990. The spreadsheet is in my bio.)

The Game of the Year, ladies and gentlemen. The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past, initially released on November 21, 1991 in Japan for the SNES, developed and published by Nintendo, is a fantastic action-adventure and is the Zelda game that has set the framework for the series in so many ways from here on out, and that it has done such a great job with that concept here already deserves a lot of praise (of which it got a lot I hear).

I can talk on and on about the positives, but I'll go over everything in detail in my review. Though I do want to add that I am surprised that Nintendo, after releasing a Game Boy Zelda game in 1993, didn't release another home console game in the series all the way until 1998. That's seven years from now. Of course, releases were almost an annual thing from then on for about a decade, but I am still surprised about this little fact. At release, this game received a 39/40 Famitsu score, the first game to ever get a score so high according to Wikipedia's article on the game, and was the best-selling game in 1991, so it's not like Nintendo wasn't aware of its popularity. Though the gap between BOTW and TOTK was even larger, so it's not any different today. Anyway, here is the review.

STORYTELLING/CHARACTERS | 7/10

The Legend of Zelda: A Link To The Past takes a massive leap in narrative in comparison to Zelda I and II. Unlike all the other improvements the game presented with the jump to the SNES, the narrative jump did not have to be this grand. In hindsight, it's what this gaves this game that little something that many games lack in atmosphere and in what players would be able to draw back on years after finishing the game.

While Zelda II simply had a scrolling text to explain the set-up and then have you go side to side until you get the "you won" text, ALTTP goes to great detail (for its time) explaining the mythology of its world.

The setting is Hyrule, which, according to Hylian scrolls, many moons ago was created by mythical gods of Power, Wisdom and Courage. It is said that after finishing their work, they left a symbol of their strength hidden somewhere in Hyrule, a golden triangle known as the Triforce. The Triforce myth, an ancient epic, tells that this Triforce, an inanimate object, may grant the wish of the person who finds it. Its hiding place is the Golden Land, and over time, more and more people, fueled by greed, looked to find it, killing each other in the progress.

One day, by accident more than anything, a gang of thieves led by Ganondorf Dragmire, or Ganon, found the gate to the Golden Land. Ganon quickly vanquished his followers to have the Triforce's powers for himself. It is explained that the Triforce can not judge between evil and good and grants every wish, so while Ganon's exact wish is not known, it did not take long for evil power to flow from the Golden Land and for disasters to beset Hyrule.

This led the lord of Hyrule to sent out the Seven Wise Men and the Knights of Hyrule to seal the entrance to the Golden Land. A war raged between them and Ganon's evil army. As the Knights struggled to find off the army, they did give the Seven Wise Men the required time to magically seal Ganon in the Golden Land. In the midst of this, the people of Hyrule, suspecting that Ganon's power stemmed from the Triforce, created a mighty weapon resistant to magic which could repulse powers granted by even the Triforce. This weapon is called the Master Sword. It is so powerful that only one of pure heart can wield it.

A long time later, you, Link, are woken up by a person who calls herself Zelda. She needs your help. The reason for her pleas? Ganon, while still sealed in the 'Dark World' (the current name for the Golden Land), wants to take over the 'Light World' (Hyrule) as well. To break the seal, he needs the life force of the seven wise men. He uses a wizard, Agahnim, as his pawn to do this, who captures the seven wise men one by one. You need to save them and kill Ganon once and for all.

And that's the back-story. Quite a detailed one, huh? This information can mostly be found in the manual for the game, but each of the seven wise men you are supposed to capture, and Zelda herself especially, tell you these stories in-game as you interact with them, leaving you with no blanks even if you didn't touch the manual.

With how limited the storytelling used to be during this time, I didn't find any of the main plot points for this game to be terribly sophisticated. But what this game did really well was to go in-depth regarding these plot points. To create plot points for all these important parts of the story at all. This is an action-adventure game with lots of puzzles of all varieties, and getting stuck and exploring to find a way forward is what you are meant to do all the time. So having an in-depth narrative like this compared to the majority of games from this time is actually pretty damn useful in motivating the player to keep going.

Out of these plot points, there is a lot to like, but I want to point out the description of the Master Sword in particular, as personally I am a big fan of weapons that can only be wielded by good-hearted people, I think that's a great sort-of requirement to set for all those young people who played this back in the day. For that reason I think when you eventually get the Master Sword, there could have been a bigger deal made of it, but maybe that's something for a later game in the series.

All in all, in terms of the big picture, the plot here is nothing special. It's a much more sophisticated telling of more or less the same story most games of the time used, but with slightly more depth to it and 'gamified' so the devs could use it as a framework for the game they were about to built. The seven wise men for example aren't this mysterious ancient group, they act as seven dungeons that you are meant to explore and beat in the game. It could have just easily been three or four, but the game would have not been as long this way. The Light and Dark worlds are simply two overworlds that you can explore, and instead of having to design two very distinct ones in shape, the same overworld style was used and just made darker and with a few changes to the traversal were made. So if you want to be cynical, yes, the game design shaped the narrative, but I don't think that's a bad thing for a game, especially of its time, and I appreciate the devs for putting in the effort to have the story not just be an afterthought to the gameplay but have it be integrated in everything you do like this.

GAMEPLAY | 16/20

This game is an action-adventure and introduces more or less the core design that the majority of the follow-ups would stick to in the Zelda series. It plays from top-down 2D perspective. You control Link and traverse an overworld filled with many secrets, enemies and dungeons. The main gameplay consists of the following loop: You need to enter a specific dungeon. The dungeons take pretty long, have multiple floors and consist of many different puzzles the player needs to solve in order to progress to the boss. During each dungeon, you find a special item, like a Fire-Rod, an Ice-Rod, a boomerang, a staff of invincibility, a hook shot, a magic hammer and more. These not only help you beat the dungeon, but once you do, you return to the overworld and a ton of optional (and mandatory, you just don't know it yet) sections of the overworld now open for you to be explored. The magic hammer for example allows you to pound stakes and obstacles into the ground which had blocked off certain areas before.

During exploration, through which there is a LOT to find, you can open up holes to secret rooms, you can find NPCs who give you side quests, you can find environmental puzzles and hints (a shield says that you should not throw something into a circle of stones, I wonder what happens if you do it anyway), you can stumble upon pieces of a heart (4 of which give you one additional hitpoint) and you find required items to potentially open up other dungeons, like a certain medaillon for example.

There are also many different caves and buildings to go to, as these often offer you optional, but incredibly useful upgrades to your gear. Help a gnome find his way to his partner and you are rewarded with an upgrade to your sword. Find a fountain, throw rupees in and you can increase the amount of bombs/arrows you can carry. You can give certain items you find to certain NPCs, who reward you with different items. "I wonder who would have any use for this mushroom?".

There is quite a lot to do here, and I'd be lying to you if I said I wasn't stuck multiple times. Taking a break of more than a week in this game means you're almost guaranteed to start over or use a guide, because a lot of information that you absolutely are required to have comes from one-time dialogue with NPCs often enough. If you don't pay attention or take a break and forget this information, you're going to be looking around for that one elusive item for a while. The game doesn't hold your hand one bit, and that's something each of you will have your own opinion about. Personally, I appreciated this because for the majority of this game, the game design matched this need for exploration by giving you multiple bread crumbs for almost everything you need to figure out. I personally missed some, for sure, and therefore had to make use of a guide a couple times, but if you enjoy the exploration part of this game a lot (and don't want to save some off those minutes to be able to progress through a challenge quicker), I'm sure you can manage to beat it without a guide.

That said, I had two issues here, which I explain more closely in the Level Design part of this review. First, is that the overworld traversal is not perfect and is too reliant on Save & Exit's to not slow the pace down considerably, and the second is that some solutions are not very intuitive. Here is a room which a bunch of tiles. You have to move one tile in a specific direction to make a chest appear. Here are 20 statues with their tongues showing. None do anything after you hit them, pull them and dash into them. Here another dozen. They don't do anything. Here are another 4. One of these opens the door you need to progress. When these are all in the same dungeon and you're stuck, and pretty much anything can trigger anything at times, it can definitely become a frustrating excercise of trial and error.

But these issues don't overshadow the excellent gameplay experience that is on offer here.

The combat is pretty straightforward. You point in one of four directions and can slash forward with your sword. Holding the attack button also produces a 360° attack. You gain a dashing ability pretty early on, which damages the majority of enemies if you dash into them. Many items you find later on also can be used for attacking purposes, so it's rare that you only rely on your sword for too long. Apart from bombs and arrows which you can constantly re-fill, you get a boomerang, fire- and ice rods, three medaillons that produce special attacks and more, some of which drain your 'magic meter', as they'd otherwise be too overpowered. Different enemies have different susceptibilities. Some can only be killed with fire, some need to take an arrow to their eye and late-game skeletons don't fully die unless you kill them with a bomb.

My main gripe is that since you can only slash forward, hitting the target can sometimes be an issue, though not too often to make it annoying. For example, some enemies have a shield or other forms of frontal protection. The shield may be on the right hand of the enemy, which means you need to place yourself further down to hit their left side, which exposes you to a hit for half a second. Then there are enemies that start producing shock waves at random times, and there is no warning for it, so way too often, you'd swing and in those couple frames between swing and hit, the shockwaves can activate and cause rather significant damage to you. Also, there are many enemies that cause knock-back. Since dungeons often have holes that you can fall into, hitting enemies and falling into them can be annoying, but avoiding the fight usually solves that issue. Finally, this is another one of those games where you need to regularly open up your inventory to change weapons, which is a common issue with games that use multiple items like this. It's not too bad but noticeable when you fight particular bosses, especially Ganon at the end.

In terms of controls, this game plays and controls pretty fluently. You want to do something, and Link does it. The only instance where I felt that the controls were truly unfair were on tight platforms where you could fall off to the sides. For some reason, walking and turning had this slippery feel to it, and instead of making a sharp right or left, Link would need a few steps to gain momentum to that side, which often leads to him falling down. On ice-y platforms I understand, but on regular platforms this was odd.

Overall though, this game offers great gameplay and exploration. It proves why it's so popular, as it is several times more polished than other action-adventures of this time.

MUSIC/SOUND/VOICE | 9/10

No voice acting. And I'm glad, at least for the SNES version, because the constant screaming of Link in the GBA version I definitely couldn't have survived for 15+ hours.

The sound design and soundtrack are both excellent here. There are some sound effects, like the discovery of a secret door, that is so iconic that even I, someone who didn't really play any Zelda games before, instantly was able to notice it. In general, there are sound effects for pretty much every action and they all sound clean, which is not something that was to be expected from games on this level at the time. The soundtrack is great for the epic journey that this is supposed to be, with many epic tracks fitting the scneario. I would have wished for more tracks to use during dungeons to make them more distinct on an auditory level, but I also would understand those who say that listening to fewer tracks increases the 'bond' with them on a nostalgic level. Many games today opt for fewer tracks as well, so I wouldn't call it a negative.

GRAPHICS/ART DESIGN | 10/10

The graphical jump here from Zelda II to ALTTP is obviously absurd, but apart from simple image quality and resolution, the art design here also stands out. Bright colors, beautiful 16-bit graphics, excellent sprite work, diverse environments and very solid special effects. Apart from just the eye-candy perspective, the game incorporates a lot of environmental puzzles to its exploration, and the tells from the environmental design are excellent as well. Here is tiny half-circle that indicates a platform, here is a small crack in the wall that is not noticeable until closer inspection, but very noticeable thereafter, indicating a secret area.

You explore all types of different areas in the game, from distinct dungeons and, to be overworld specific, forests, deserts, mountains, swamps, castles and more, and you have few, if any games that look quite like this on such a scale at the time.

ATMOSPHERE/IMMERSION | 9/10

You truly feel like a hero embarking on an epic journey in this one. The graphics and soundtrack set a great stage for your travels, and there is a lot of attention to detail in the world-building that one can only appreciate. A cute thing for example was when I passed the controller to my six year old brother for a while. He started swinging his sword at a bird in the Dark World that just would not die, and to our amazement, after a few dozen hits, dozens of the same bird started flooding the screen and attacking us. Small details that most players won't experieence are always fun to find. One additional thing I enjoyed is that there is actual in-game meaning to the items you find. You don't find a generic book, you find the Book of Mudora, which can translate inscriptions. You find Staffs of Somaria and Byrna, you find three magic medaillons like the Bombos, which only the hero bearing the master sword can retrieve. It's really basic at this point of course, but it does add to the immersion.

CONTENT | 10/10

Few games are so chock-full of stuff to find while exploring. The great part is that the majority of the overworld does have stuff to find. The overworld is seperated through screens, and I wouldn't be surprised if there is something useful or interesting on each screen.

LEVEL/MISSION DESIGN | 8/10

You have specific dungeons to go to, which are marked on your map. That's all that is marked though. You need to find your way there on your own and sometimes, you need to find specific items that unlock your entry to the dungeons themselves. This is all paced really well.

The overworld is differentiated in two versions, the Light World and the Dark World. These are basically the same overworld, but with different looking environments, different obstacles and more enemies on the Dark World part. For example, in the Light World, there is a Kakariko Village to the west, and in the Dark World, the same area is called Village of Outcasts. You can switch between these worlds in two different ways. You can either use a 'Magic Mirror' to switch from Dark to Light, or, since you can't switch back this way, you need to find a warp portal to switch from Light to Dark.

All in all, the game is really well designed. My only issue here is how annoying traversal can be at times. Unless you want to run across the map for the umpteenth time, you have to rely on 'Save & Quit', which allows you to select a location to spawn in (when in the Light World) once you enter back into the game, or which places you at a specific spot near the middle of the overworld (when in the Dark World). Later, the flute item allows you to fast travel to specific locations in the Light World. But this is a minor issue overall and a subjective thing for sure, though more interconnectivity that opens up shortcuts later on would have been amazing.

One additional point I want to make is that some items are very hard to find or making progress can be tough to figure out at times. And while my complaint is not that part, it's that crucial information is often given once and as an aside, so not paying attention once or simply forgetting about something hours after getting the information means you can be stuck for a while. I don't think a journal that notes the most important stuff would have been the worst thing in the world.

Overall, the game balances it game quite well though. You'll get a great dose of exploring, of making your way through large dungeons, of battling and do so in a very good pace for the majority of it.

CONCEPT/INNOVATION | 10/10

Inner-series, the jump from Zelda II to ALTTP is incredible, but even generally, there was no game quite like this at the time, or at least none that managed to put it together quite as well in an action-adventure setting. There is greated attention given to storytelling and world-building, the soundtrack is great, the graphics are cream of the crop, the dungeons are uniquely designed and offer a fun challenge and exploration is incredibly rewarding.

REPLAYABILITY | 3/5

There are more than a few side quests you can still find on subsequent playthroughs, as well as heart pieces. Even improving your sword or upgrading your bomb and arrow space are completely optional parts that are easy to miss, so there will be plenty to discover. The story is linear however and most special items you can find are mandatory.

PLAYABILITY | 5/5

The game worked well at all times.

OVERALL | 86/100

You want to know what the best game of 1991 is? You've probably just read the review for it. Few games during this time allowed for this much exploration and managed to for the majority of the game to balance the joy of discovery with the potential frustrations of being stuck this well by offering breadcrumbs of info in its NPC dialogue and environments that attentive players take to their advantage to continuously make progress. The dungeons are distinct, large and filled with environmental puzzles and combat challenges to overcome. The soundtrack is very good, the graphics great in comparison to its contemporaries and while the overworld design does get somewhat tedious from time to time, you're going to get a very good and prototypical Zelda experience here. If you like Zelda games and you didn't play this, I don't know what you're doing. If you're unsure, future releases will likely offer plenty of QoL improvements that will make them more newcomer friendly, but even if you start your Zelda journey somewhere else, don't forget about A Link To The Past.