FoxyLand is a charming platformer for the Sega Mega Drive, released in 2020 by PSCD Games in collaboration with Bug-Studio. Available only as a physical release, the game features 30 levels where you play as a fox whose fox lady has been kidnapped by a vulture. Your mission is to collect gems to unlock each level’s exit and gather cherries for bonus lives.

Controls are straightforward: all three buttons (A, B, C) are used for jumping, including a double jump, and you can crouch to avoid obstacles. The game progressively introduces new mechanics like climbing vines, levers that activate platforms or traps, and disappearing blocks. Enemies such as frogs (which require precise timing to defeat), possums, and vultures add to the challenge. Each area concludes with a boss battle, including a memorable homage to Donkey Kong.

Visually, the game is striking with colorful sprites and seasonal level themes—lush forests, autumn settings, and icy landscapes—all featuring parallax scrolling backgrounds. While the music is pleasant, it can be somewhat repetitive. The controls are tight, providing a satisfying platforming experience, though some levels may require multiple attempts. The game could also benefit from more variety in items and power-ups to enhance replayability.

Recently, I had the pleasure of diving into the world of Fydo’s Magic Tiles a unique puzzle game for the original Gameboy. The game turned out to be an incredible surprise with its combination of match-four mechanics, Tetris-like falling tiles, and an engaging achievement system.

The game, created by Tom Sutton with art by Grey Lure, introduces players to a whimsical world centered around a wizard cat. Despite the misleading title, Fydo is more feline than canine. The gameplay combines elements of Candy Crush and Tetris reminiscent of the classic Tetris Attack or Panel de Pon in Japan.

Unlike traditional puzzle games where the goal is a high score, Fydo’s Magic Tiles adopts an achievement system. Players strive to accomplish various feats, such as creating high combos, triggering collapsing structures, or simply playing through all three available songs in the game. With 17 hidden achievements, the game encourages experimentation and creativity.

The mechanics involve matching tiles adorned with suits of cards and a crescent moon. These tiles fall from the top, and players use a cursor to drag and drop them to create matches. A unique twist is the appearance of pearls, obstructing movement until adjacent tiles are removed.

One standout feature is the absence of a traditional score. Instead, the game halts after destroying 999 blocks. This deviation from the norm adds an element of strategy and encourages players to explore different ways to achieve success, however the lack of multiplayer functionality might put some people off.

Laserscape is a challenging puzzle-action game developed by Vector 5 for the Commodore 64. In this game, you find yourself trapped in a series of single-screen prison rooms composed of tiles. Your objective is to escape each room by painting specific tiles to match the color of the exit door. You accomplish this by walking over the tiles, which change color upon each pass. In some levels, tiles progress through a set sequence of colors and stop changing once they reach the final required color. In more difficult levels, the colors loop back to the beginning if you step on a tile too many times, requiring careful planning to ensure all tiles are correctly colored simultaneously.

The primary hazard comes from a pair of lasers moving along the north and east walls of each room. These lasers are indicated by small red dots and periodically fire beams across entire rows and columns. If you’re caught in the path of a laser when it fires, you lose a life. With only five lives and 20 increasingly difficult levels, the game demands both strategic thinking and quick reflexes. Additional challenges include holes that appear in some tiles, which you must avoid to prevent falling. Movement is grid-based but fast, and while there is a time limit for each level, the pressing concern is usually avoiding lasers and managing the tile colors, especially in levels where stepping on a tile too many times resets its color sequence.

In this fast-paced platformer developed by 21bloques for the Amstrad CPC you control one of the Brush siblings—the brother or the sister—in a mission to paint all designated platforms by walking or jumping over them before the timer runs out. Movement is quick and fluid, allowing you to move left or right and perform jumps, including double jumps to reach higher areas. The game’s speed adds to the challenge, requiring precise control to navigate the platforms effectively.

The levels feature a mix of paintable platforms and non-paintable obstacles like brick walls or metal beams, which are visually distinct. Various critters such as meter worms, rats, penguins, snails, and UFOs roam the stages as enemies. Contact with an enemy results in losing a life, but you respawn at the same spot with brief invincibility, allowing you to continue without losing significant progress. The main challenge comes from maneuvering quickly and accurately to paint all platforms while avoiding both enemies and missteps due to the fast movement.

Brush Brothers offers both single-player and two-player modes, including cooperative and competitive play. In cooperative mode, both players work together to paint all platforms, with the brother painting them green and the sister painting them orange. In competitive mode, players vie to paint more platforms than the other within the time limit, and each player’s painted platforms remain their own color. This mode features unique levels not found in the single-player or cooperative modes.