Panel Ninja Keesamaru (Game Boy)

 Despite having a translation patch, this is a game that I've never seen mentioned before, anywhere. I only found it myself because I was copying Pipe Dream over to the Game Boy folder of my RGB30, and decided to copy over some alphabetically local games that caught my eye alongside it. Also, there's almost no text in the game, and what little there is wouldn't present any barrier to progress, so it's an odd choice for having a translation patch.

 

Each stage is a single screen puzzle, in which you have to literally leave no stone unturned in seeking out the exit door and the key to open said door. Your main action, other than moving, is to flip floor panels. When you do this, you flip the panel in front of and behind you, toggling those panels between two positions: blank, upon which you can walk, and shiny, upon which you can't. So you have to flip tiles in such a manner as to make your own way through the stage, and also to leave blank spaces onto which stones can be rolled. There's also enemies wandering about in some stages, that can be defeated by flipping the tiles they're walking across.

 

After fourteen stages, you'll also face your first boss fight! The boss wanders back and forth at the top of the screen, shooting at you, while you have to roll stones into pits, looking for the switch to step on that kills the boss. Interesting that they'd make the boss fights into puzzles, when there are (mostly pointless) single-use weapon items hidden around the stages. Obviously, this is the kind of game where everything has a clear and specific purpose in the world (a quality I've referred to in the past as "purity"), and every stage is an arrangement of those elements that tests your understanding of them, with new elements being introduced every couple of stages. It's a surprise that it doesn't have a stage editor, actually, since similarly constructed Game Boy games did, like the pirate cart classics Pitman and Hyper Lode Runner.

 

Unfortunately, while I was enjoying this game for a couple of hours, disaster eventually struck! Eventually, you'll "level up", and instead of just flipping the tiles directly in front of and behind you, you'll flip the four tiles orthogonally adjecent to you. I feel like this might have been implemented without it having been properly tested, as it mostly makes things more difficult, rather than easier, and I eventually reached a point, almost twenty stages in, where it just made progress impossible, as it prevented me from making a space to roll a stone, and then clear a path back to the other side of the stone to do the pushing. So, I'd recommend the game, were it not for that one small, but devestating flaw. Never mind.