I'm bad at simple puzzles under pressure...

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Puzzle & Action: Ichidant-R - 1994

The Puzzle & Action series is a sort of semi-spinoff to the more well-known Bonanza Bros, but the only thing that really links the two is a similar art style and slapstick sense of humour. The gameplay has shifted from a stealth action game to a puzzle-focused minigame compilation, feeling akin to a predecessor of Namco’s Point Blank, but with less shooting and more brain-busting.

Here you play as one of two knights on a quest to rescue a princess. Along the way you fight against guardsmen via puzzle minigames selected via a roulette wheel, testing your pattern recognition, deduction skills, timing and general problem solving. If you can imagine WarioWare combined with The Logical Journey of the Zoombinis, you might have a rough idea of what to expect. The timer is strict on every minigame keeping the pressure high and the pace frantic. You’d be surprised how taxing simplistic puzzles like these can get the second you’re feeling the pressure on you to clear them within ten seconds. Or perhaps I’m just an airheaded ditz who is projecting her own ineptitude at stacking yellow frogs onto the readers. Either is entirely possible.

The minigames, while simplistic, are effective in challenging your brain in plenty of unique skills. You’ll quickly pick up on the minigames you excel at and the ones you struggle with, so timing the roulette wheel to land on a minigame that plays to your strengths when your low on lives is integral to staying alive, as the roulette moves slowly enough for deliberately choosing minigames to be possible. Additionally, extra lives on occasion can be earned on the roulette too, however the trade-off is that if the roulette wheel lands on that extra life panel, the game will randomly select a minigame for you to play out of your control. Completing four minigames will have you defeat the current guard you are fighting, resulting in a slapstick animation of your knight besting them in combat and moving onto the next combatant. Stage 1 only has one guard to fight, Stage 2 has two, Stage 3 has three and so on. There’s a total of four stages, which are broken up by extra minigames where you ride on horseback and have a chance to earn extra lives by collecting enough gold.

My favourite minigames tended to be focused on pattern recognition. One of which, depicted to the right, involves trying to find a thief hidden in a town. At the top of the screen you are shown what houses he passed through on his escape route, while on the map you must find a trail of houses that matches that route. Another favourite, depicted below to the left, has you figuring out a route through a maze by using teleporter tiles that warp you to another tile with the same symbol on it. To the right of that maze minigame is one somewhat similar in aesthetic to the thief game, where you have to finish building a rocket ship. The ship missing it’s part is located on the left side of the screen and you have to find the parts that slot into the shapes of the gaps like a jigsaw puzzle, while also making sure that the colours match up with the existing parts. Generally I found that I struggled more with the counting minigames. Yes, I’m aware that sounds especially mundane to have trouble with, but you need to be able to count fast to keep up with this game and also be able to keep track of the entire screen at once.

I was initially intending to keep aiming for a 1CC, but in the end two things deterred me. First off, this isn’t a complaint about the game at all, but I find this game surprisingly exhausting. Puzzle & Action somehow takes more focus and concentration for me to succeed at then even the most intense shoot-em-ups. I managed to make it halfway through Stage 3 on a single continue as my personal best, which I’m still proud of at least. Strangely though, there’s no scoring system in this game, meaning that there’s not really any clear indication of how well you’ve played on every attempt, making trying to clear the game on a single credit feel of lesser importance. Secondly, for something I think is genuinely a mark against the game, it’s unfortunately just a bit on the repetitive side. Compared to the Point Blank games which have around 40+ minigames, Ichidant-R only has 20, and the game is also long enough that you will have to replay several in order to beat the game. The minigames get longer and more drawn out the longer you play as well. At the start you only need to solve three puzzles in that minigame to progress, but by the end you need to solve seven in a row to clear a single minigame. This combined with the stages getting longer and longer with more and more guards to fight results in some bad fatigue. None the less, I do think Ichidant-R is worth a look for a frantic and unique brain teaser. It may leave your head feeling scrambled as you try to keep up with it’s breakneck pace, but it’s satisfying enough in those moments of success that it’s worth occasionally feeling like an idiot for failing to stack the yellow frogs yet again. For the third time in a row. I am embarrassingly bad at the frog minigame.

- Written by MSX_POCKY, 28th Feb. 2023