In 2021, I was over the moon with Moonsprout Games’ (pun not intended) Bug Fables on Switch: finally a proper Paper Mario-esque fan-game that came close to the original. Three years later, Nintendo surprised us all by dropping the Thousand-Year Door remake announcement in a recent Nintendo Direct. Is this really happening? And the release date wasn’t that far off either! Yes, it really happened, and I’m very glad to say/write that it’s not just a quick cash grab riding on the nostalgi...| Nintendo Switch on Jefklak's Codex
One of my wife’s Switch eShop excavations recently yielded Lil’ Guardsman, a seemingly small and perhaps a bit generic adventure game that’s leaning more towards Papers, Please than to Lost In Play, even though Lil the protagonist shares the lush curly hair that fooled me into thinking this was the work of Happy Juice Interactive. Instead, we’re served Hilltop Studios’ first with a few saucy references to adventure games’ greatest leveraging the simplified core mechanics of Papers...| Nintendo Switch on Jefklak's Codex
After playing and reviewing so many old school Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (TNMT) games, it was inevitable to eventually land on Digital Eclipse’s retro Cowabunga Collection that successfully manages to wrap and tie a bow around the best 8-bit and 16-bit pixelated Heroes in a Half Shell. No more running around and shelling out (ha!) big bucks for a busted up and barely working cartridge copy: for €35, you’ve got yourself thirteen TNMT beat-em-up games all originally developed by Konami...| Nintendo Switch on Jefklak's Codex
After a few months of on and off track building in Railbound, it dawned to me that I will probably never finish the game and could just as well do my write-up. So get yourself a Ticket To Ride—no wait, it’s not that kind of game. Or is it? Judging a book by its cover won’t get you very far here, as the two dogs on the cover have nothing to do with the gameplay and the railroad in the background isn’t as broken as the ones you’ll have to fix in the levels. The premise of Railbound is...| Nintendo Switch on Jefklak's Codex
For some reason, I always think of this game as Pocket Knight: Shovel Dungeon. The Pocket Dungeon subtitle doesn’t seem to stick well to the Shovel Knight mainline title? The title of the game doesn’t entirely give away what it’s about: okay, our trusty blue Shovel Knight, but this time in pocket size? No? Puzzles, you say? Why not Puzzle Dungeon then? Anyway. In Pocket Puzzle—ah, dang it!—you’re shoveling away chains of titular Shovel Knight enemies in a 2D Tetris-like grid where...| Nintendo Switch on Jefklak's Codex
I would not have played this quirky little platformer if it wasn’t for my wife’s urge to aimlessly scroll through the Nintendo Switch eStore. About $1.5 and three to four hours of mashing the A and X buttons later, I have to reconsider my prejudice against cheap looking mobile games that are ported to home consoles: some of them are actually not half bad. Goblin Sword is one of those. Goblin Sword is at heart a very simple game: it’s a 2D platformer where you wield a sword to make enemy...| Nintendo Switch on Jefklak's Codex
I violated my no roguelike buying rule yet again, only this time, I didn’t end up being disappointed, as I received exactly what I expected: a heavy luck-driven poker-based game with huge spikes (and downfalls) in game runs. Everyone knows poker, and everyone knows sometimes that queen needed to turn your disarray of junk into a beautiful straight flush just doesn’t show up. Balatro even ups the luck ante by throwing in crazy jokers and other bonuses, and even that didn’t bother me. Wel...| Nintendo Switch on Jefklak's Codex
Why let a perfectly good 2D HD pixel art engine go to waste, they must have thought at Square Enix a few years after the release of the first Octopath Traveler. While I haven’t played the Octopath games (yet), I have to admit that the beautiful retro-esque vibe with modern touches sprinkled upon looked very appealing—and very applicable to the Strategy RPG genre—indeed. The deceptive Final Fantasy Tactics vibe eventually swayed me to dive in head first without the free demo, a classic m...| Nintendo Switch on Jefklak's Codex
2023 has been an amazing year for games, and Nintendo’s wonderful Wonder is no exception. Super Mario Bros. Wonder is the first truly new 2D Mario game since the release of the New Super Mario Bros. (NSMB) franchise in 2006—that’s a stunning 17 years, for anyone who’s counting! When it comes to bringing back to life beloved 2D genres, Nintendo seems to be on a roll. Just like the recent Metroid Dread, Wonder scored wonderfully high among critics, and just like Dread, there’s very li...| Nintendo Switch on Jefklak's Codex
DUSK: Something Went Wrong, Better Kill Everything. Something Went Wrong: Better Kill Everything it says on the back of the dark red box that’s decorated with looming fiend-like skeletons called Wendigos guarding a dangerous looking cathedral. What a promising start! Better kill everything indeed: DUSK is a retro-inspired shooter where fluid constant movement is a requirement to survive the swarms of horrifying enemies, just like the nineties shooters you know and love. DUSK doesn’t beat ...| jefklakscodex.com
Metroid of Persiania: The Lost Crown. When I picked up the latest and still very recent Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown as a pleasant distraction for Wargroove’s longer and longer slogfests, I did not expect the game—in my head portrayed as yet another boring metroidvania clone—to be that big and that good. In stark contrast, the drama evolved around the game with reported layoffs after “softer than expected” sales reports makes me question what kind of expectations (and practices)...| jefklakscodex.com
Captain Toad: Treasure Tracker: Diorama Diamond Hunting. What originally started as a fun little diversion in Super Mario 3D World for the Wii U in 2013 a year later turned out into a Toad-filled fully fledged diorama puzzle game, although it was still locked behind a flopped console. Fortunately for Mario Universe sidekick lovers, in 2018, Treasure Tracker was ported to both the 3DS and Switch—of which I played the latter one—as an attempt to maximize that sweet sweet Toad love. Via Jefk...| jefklakscodex.com
The long-running Ys series has been a blind spot for me until my gaming buddy Joel kept bragging about how good the Felghana PSP release is. After convincing me to play at least one Ys game and recommending this one in particular—in return for posting his Top 25 GOAT so here’s that social pressure you wanted!—I caved in and bought the second re-release version for the Switch called Ys Memoire. Wait, second? Apparently, The Oath in Felghana is a remake of the 1990 Ys III: Wanderers from ...| Retro Gaming on Jefklak's Codex
Shogun Showdown: Samurai Combo Shuffling. In the beginning of this year, I was pleasantly surprised by a little Western-themed gunslinging game called Guncho. In Guncho, you take turns in a hexagonal grid killing everyone on sight before moving on to the next randomized level. Shogun Showdown feels very much like a medieval Japanese version of Guncho: it is very puzzly, has you carefully consider your moves, and one wrong move can screw up the entire battle strategy. And that’s a good thing...| jefklakscodex.com
Castlevania Dominus Collection: The Holy Trinity Is Finally Complete. I suppose it was only a matter of time before the Nintendo DS Castlevania games would be joined in an excellent M2 Collection published by Limited Run Games. Now the holy trinity of Castlevania collections is finally complete: first Anniversary Collection, then Advance Collection, and now finally the Dominus one. It certainly feels great to have them all on the shelf in their red boxes! Via Jefklak's Codex| jefklakscodex.com
My wife managed to salvage Tangle Tower out of the ever-increasing gigantic Switch eShop garbage heap a few years ago. We had no idea what to expect, and based on the trailer, we thought it would be a Professor Layton-esque puzzle adventure. After a few hours in, it feels a bit more like a low key Duck Detective with added puzzles, exceptionally witty writing and great voice acting thrown in for good measure. Welcome to Tangle Tower, or what Grimoire, the private detective of service, calls a...| Retro Gaming on Jefklak's Codex
Inscryption: Card Game Inception. Have you ever played a game where you felt the game was playing you? As the walls of meaning start to crumble, you gradually lose grip of the term “game”. And then another game within a game presents itself. And another one. Yet all you can say as you continue to stare at the screen is What The Fuck? Didn’t I buy just another indie card game? Yes and no—welcome to Card Game Inscrypception. We need to go deeper! Via Jefklak's Codex| jefklakscodex.com
Celeste: Strawberry Picking on Mountaintops. Does Celeste really need an introduction? I ascended the snowy mountaintop back in 2018 when the game initially was released but simply forgot to take notes. The game’s many secrets, extra modes, and achievements basically asks for a revisit, so I did, finger at the ready to take screenshots where needed. Via Jefklak's Codex| jefklakscodex.com
The first few seconds of Duck Detective immediately sets the scene: in a sleazy office—or rather that of Eugene McQuacklin, burned-out just-divorced barely-a-nickle-left private detective—a phone rings that might just yield the case Eugene needs to get out of his personal mess: there’s a salami bandit operating in the offices of BearBus, a local bus company, and it’s up to you to deduct their identity and put a stop to them! The first thing to do, of course, is to find out who hired y...| Retro Gaming on Jefklak's Codex
Ittle Dew 2+: a Lovely 2D Zelda Hampered By Terrible Combat. In an ideal world, Ittle Dew 2—I played the 2+ version on the Switch—would have been everything I wanted from a puzzle-centric 2D action/adventure that’s clearly inspired by the classic 2D Zeldas. Unfortunately, the real world is far from ideal: a fact we’re faced with when browsing the news and when playing this game. I started playing this back in 2018 and after about three hours gave up. I couldn’t remember why and gave...| jefklakscodex.com
Loco Motive: An Exquisite Pixel Art Throwback Adventure. Every now and then, an indie game developer proves that you don’t need millions and a Lucas Ranch to create a lovely pixel art throwback point & click adventure game. Loco Motive by Robust Games could just as well be a hallmark model that proves my point. Made with love by only a handful of passionate folks and released at the tail end of 2024, Loco Motive is yet another great adventure game we get treated with this year. The point & ...| jefklakscodex.com
When I saw Nintendo Life place Kirby and the Forgotten Land on top of their Best Kirby Games Of All Time list, I thought either they were joking or recency bias was at it again, but after finally having laid eyes on the Forgotten Land myself, I don’t think they were far off. I almost slept on it since the first Kirby Switch game was nothing special. In case that wasn’t clear: Kirby’s first true 3D adventure is very much worth checking out. During the Nintendo 64 era, HAL already attempt...| Retro Gaming on Jefklak's Codex
Have you ever wanted to mop the floor, take out the trash, and refresh bed linen while on a very tight time limit, preferably split-screen with a buddy? That’s the premise of Hotel Hustle, another small and weird game from RedDeerGames we previously knew from Freaky Trip. As soon as we booted the game, I knew I recognized the art look & feel from somewhere, but I couldn’t really place my finger on it, until I remembered Freaky Trip. Honestly, that moment was a painful one, as RedDeerGames...| Retro Gaming on Jefklak's Codex
Death's Door: Git Gut Link Style. After reading Roy Tang’s Death’s Door review and then discovering the physical edition was only €20 in my local supermarket, I snagged a copy without blinking an eye, not really knowing what I was getting myself into. All I knew was that Death’s Door is a top-down Zelda-like explorative action-adventure. What I didn’t know then is the other game Acid Nerve was influenced by: Dark Souls. Is this another “Git Gut” game, this time Link Style? Yes a...| jefklakscodex.com
Dicey Dungeons: Roguelike Rolling. In case you were wondering what a combination of dice rolling, deck building, and roguelikes would look like, you can stop wondering now. Terry Cavanagh’s Dicey Dungeons is the result of an interesting set of card game, dice game, and video game mechanics, topped with a dash of roguelike fluff to increase the lifespan of the game. Via Jefklak's Codex| jefklakscodex.com
Mario + Rabbids: XCOM Battle For Newbies?. For both Mario and Rabbids fans, Mario + Rabbids: Kingdom Battle seems like an impossible combination that should never have happened. For XCOM fans, having the Mario universe join in on the turn-based tactical action seems just as ludicrous. Yet Ubisoft somehow managed to wrap strong enough tape around these seemingly disconnected formulas: the result is a solid strategy game with the expected funky rabbid goofs that has been played by over 7.5 mill...| jefklakscodex.com
Dead Cells & Return to Castlevania. With its latest DLC, the world of Dead Cells recently merged with the world of Castlevania, and as a ‘vania nut myself, reading all these glowing reviews, I simply had to take a peek. Unfortunately, I came back disappointed, although to be honest, it’s not entirely the game’s fault, as I my brain simply refused to register the term roguelite on the back of the cover. To me, the genre can very much be hit or miss, and as far as Dead Cells is concerned,...| jefklakscodex.com
A Tiny Sticker Tale: Wholesome Scrapbooking. A peculiar donkey on a quest by boat clutching a sticker book is what convinced my wife to press the Buy button on the Nintendo Switch eShop. We had little idea of what to expect, except for the sticker fest. A Tiny Sticker Tale is more than that: it also tries to convey a wholesome message: be kind to others, persevere during hardships, and so forth. While I found that most messages were lost in translation, the game does an admirable job in tryin...| jefklakscodex.com
Freaky Trip: A Bizarre But Buggy Diversion. Go through untypically typical places and solve totally absurd riddles on your rescue mission. That’s Freaky Trip’s premise according to developer and publisher Red Deer Games. Given the single screen point & click nature to solve these freaky puzzles, that almost sounds like a Gobliiins game! My wife found this one in the Nintendo Switch eStore during an indie showcase. For just for $1.99 , we were more than eager to put on our adventurous shoe...| jefklakscodex.com
Project Warlock: a Modern Wolf3D. I played through Project Warlock in June of 2020 but forgot to collect screenshots and add a review here, so after being done with Nightmare Reaper, I picked it back up to see how similar or different both retro-inspired shooters were, since both games gave me heavy Blake Stone and Wolfenstein 3D feelings. Via Jefklak's Codex| jefklakscodex.com
Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night Switch Review. One year later, Ritual of the Night is still unplayable on the Nintendo Switch. Numerous patches later, the game still stutters and crashes, with its most popular screen being the loading one. We’re off to a great start here… Via Jefklak's Codex| jefklakscodex.com
Nightmare Reaper: Pixel Gore Galore. Have you ever had a true nightmare, complete with flying guts, blood spattering, and things exploding? No? Perhaps then it’s time to try out Nightmare Reaper, a retro-inspired pixelated roguelite shooter (a what?) that, once you get your hands on the better weapons, invokes exactly that. Until you run out of ammo, fail to dodge projectiles or that mad zombie dash, or get pushed into lava. Luckily, dying in a bad dream means you just get to wake up, rise,...| jefklakscodex.com
Quake (2021 Remaster). After playing Outlaws, I felt the need to go back one more year to id Software’s 1996 seminal shooter title, Quake. But what is there left to say about one of the very first fully 3D polygon-rendered shooters that further propelled the shooter, multiplayer, and modding community to the heights they are now? Everyone has heard of Quake, and without it, we wouldn’t have Half-Life, the birth of story in FPS, or the Team Fortress mod, the birth of char- and team-based m...| jefklakscodex.com
Animal Crossing: New Horizons Adventure Blog. It is a fresh breeze indeed as the Island unfolds, buildings appear, and I sweat my ass off trying to collect enough lumber and clay to satisfy even the most grumpy of Tom Nooks. Welcome to the latest installment of Animal Crossing! Via Jefklak's Codex| jefklakscodex.com
Hollow Knight: Metroidvania marries Demon Souls. I hope they get divorced. That’s my review, condensed into a single sentence. As much as I loved my deep dive into the world of Hallownest, as the end came near, I tried stopping playing three times. And I’m not alone. Here are a few fun Reddit threads: Via Jefklak's Codex| jefklakscodex.com
Titan Quest VS Diablo 2: an In-Depth Analysis. Originally released only two years after Sacred, Titan Quest combines Greek mythology with hack and slash: a world full of mesmerizing creatures to kill, wealth to collect, and above all: horrible bugs and boring gameplay. Should you play this hack & slash game over others such as Dungeon Siege and Diablo 2? The answer is a definitive no. Via Jefklak's Codex| jefklakscodex.com
Ion Fury: the Spiritual Successor of Duke3D?. Time to kick ass again - and don’t forget to chew bubblegum! Does Shelly and the Build engine stand a chance anno 2020? Via Jefklak's Codex| jefklakscodex.com
Tactics Ogre: A Reborn SNES Masterpiece. What if you take an obscure 1995 SNES strategy RPG, Tactics Ogre: Let Us Cling Together originally developed by Quest, and remaster it for the PSP? In 2010, that sounded like a good idea, and it was fairly well-received. In fact, that release, together with the remaster of a more well-known Japanese SRPG called Final Fantasy Tactics, was the sole reason why I bought a PSP Slim in the first place. The PSP version of Let Us Cling Together completely over...| jefklakscodex.com
Pilgrims: a Micro Card-based Adventure. When I think about Amanita Design, I think about Machinarium and the beautiful hand-drawn art with a dark twist. As soon as you lay eyes on the screenshots below, you’ll immediately reckognize the style if you’ve played Machinarium before. The game is simply stunning and its style oozes charm: I simply love the way the pencil and colors come to life. In Pilgrims, the effect is even more pronounced as the adventure takes place on a small subset of th...| jefklakscodex.com
Yoku's Island Express: a Pinball Metroidvania. If you’ve ever wanted to play as a dung beetle postman on a small tropical island, bouncing your dung ball up and down while traveling from mailbox to mailbox, here’s your chance. That sounds great, and the alluring premise of the term metroidvania slapped on it sounds even more promising. Via Jefklak's Codex| jefklakscodex.com
Void Bastards: Scrapheap Scrounging. Void Bastards is as weird as the title suggests—but in a delightful way. In it, you board spaceships, shoot stuff, watch “foomp”, “whizz” and “mumble” comic effects, loot even more stuff, and get the hell out of there. Chances are also high of dying from radiation, oxygen shortages, or just a hail of missiles. Not to worry in that case: there’s always another anonymous captive convict (against their will?) waiting in line to rinse and repea...| jefklakscodex.com
Axiom Verge 2: Plenty of Nanites To Spice Things Up. Thomas Happ’s 2015 Axiom Verge thoroughly impressed me: it is a superb and faithful Metroid game that is not Metroid itself; coded, designed, and composed by a single guy. The ending suggested Tom wasn’t done with “The Breach”, his narrative sci-fi take on the multiverse. While Axiom Verge 2 doesn’t feature the same protagonist—or world(s), for that matter—it does contain traces of Trace, the PatternMind scientist that starred...| jefklakscodex.com
Metroid Dread: The Sequel Fusion Deserves?. Nineteen years later, Metroid Fusion for the Game Boy Advance finally got a much-deserved sequel! I’m ignoring Other M and Samus Returns right now as the story of Metroid Dread picks up where Fusion left off, and it’s been a very, very long time since we’ve seen Samus in action on a 2(.5?)D space, shooting and bombing her way through the planet ZDR. Spanish game development studio MercurySteam—also responsible for 2017’s Samus Returns and ...| jefklakscodex.com
Axiom Verge: A One-Man Love Letter To NES Metroid. In March 2010, after witnessing the success of early indie video games like 2008’s Braid, Tom Happ started building a virtual world as a side project. Five years later, that sci-fi hacker-inspired world was released into the wild and met with the deserved critical acclaim. It was ported to various platforms, including in 2017 on the Switch where I played it on—and even received a Limited Run physical release that I’m proud to own. Via J...| jefklakscodex.com
Cursed To Golf: Frustrating Roguelike Torment. The thing that probably comes to mind when laying eyes on Cursed To Golf is another retro-inspired 2D Golf game called Golf Story—except that this time, we’re not golfing the conventional top-down way but the 2D side view way. What is less obvious from the screenshots is that Cursed To Golf is a “roguelike” with procedurally generated maps and a particularly tormenting permadeath implementation. If that short description still tickles you...| jefklakscodex.com
Agent A: A (Quite Good) Puzzle in Disguise. Agent A’s subtitle, A Puzzle in Disguise, speaks volumes. Here’s a (quick) game that plays like a point & click adventure game, but is actually a giant escape room. You are Agent A and you’ve just witnessed your boss being killed by an evil miss LeRouge with her kitty—and also, more importantly, an expert in (counter-)espionage. Her primary task consists of… “taking care” of Agent A. The bulk of the game takes place in and around her h...| jefklakscodex.com
Dexter Stardust: Adventures In Outer Space. A casual browse through the Nintendo Switch’s digital Shop pages—something my wife loves to do to discover random new things—brought our attention to a cheap (literally and figuratively) game called Dexter Stardust. I wasn’t convinced and we moved on. Two months later, the same thing happened, only this time it was on sale. The trailer tried really hard to emulate Monkey Island’s witty humor but I still wasn’t convinced by the muted colo...| jefklakscodex.com
Unpacking: Meditative Monotomy. Picture this. You buy and play a video game in which you tidy up your home. Marie Kondo would be proud. In Unpacking, all you do is move from one place to the next, open the boxes after the move, and put stuff where it belongs: books in the bookcase, pots and pans in the kitchen sink cabinet, drawing material in the desk drawers, and so forth. This sounds very strange and perhaps even dull, and yet, Unpacking by Witchbeam won numerous awards. Why is this so app...| jefklakscodex.com
TOEM: A Wholesome Photo Adventure. TOEM is the mystery that you somehow have to discover, photograph, and take back home to show your mom. TOEM is the beauty that is the world, the kindness that are the people within it, and the lovely weirdness that is the interconnectedness of it all. It is very hard to explain a delightfully weird game such as TOEM, but I’ll try my best anyway. Via Jefklak's Codex| jefklakscodex.com
Rayman Legends: The Not So Definitive Edition. Back in October last year, I picked up Rayman Legends for a very reasonable price at the local mall. The problem was, the inside was empty. Read more about that in questionable game publishing methods. Suffice to say I was annoyed. It took me until January to get out the box—and stupid download code—to finally give the game a try on the Nintendo Switch. Via Jefklak's Codex| jefklakscodex.com
Irony Curtain: From Monkey Humor With Love. What do you get when you mix the humor of The Curse of Monkey Island with the looks of Deponia and the puzzles of Broken Sword? Coat all this with a lot of Russian Red and the end result is Irony Curtain: From Matryoshka With Love, a surprisingly well put-together adventure game from Artifex Mundi, a developer that mostly creates short smartphone-based games. Via Jefklak's Codex| jefklakscodex.com
Flipping Death. Collecting Skull and Bones—no, not the 2001 Cypress Hill album—is part of the October/November Halloween fun. Flipping Death, a 2018 game from Zoink, a Swedish developer I never heard of before, perfectly fits your autumny morbid craving. Zoink is related to Image & From, well known for the SteamWorld games. Flipping Death is hard to describe and categorize: it’s weird, in a loving way—until you take control of the main character and have to move about to solve puzzles...| jefklakscodex.com
