From the moment the green gumshoe waddles into the precinct, you know you’re in for a vibe-heavy stroll rather than a brain-twisting quest. In this Gameboy prequel you zig-zag through a chunky beautifully illustrated office, chatting up familiar faces and hilarious new recruits while hunting the five runaway paper-clips that gate-keep your precious magnifying glass. Mechanics stay cheerfully bare-bones: bop into objects, read delightfully silly dialogue, then grin at freshly chiptuned themes. The joy lives in the personality overload—every four-shade sprite oozes the off-kilter charm of Grace Bruxner’s 3-D trilogy (series info). Watching dense console/PC scenes squeezed into pocket hardware feels like uncovering a lost ’90s prototype. Zero fail states and a brisk half-hour runtime make it a snack-sized buddy comedy that reminds you adventures don’t need big stakes to be memorable. Slip it into your handheld during a coffee break and you’ll finish with a grin on your face.

Starting deep inside the Tomb of Eat-Em-Up, you realise quickly that treasure isn’t the priority—lunch is. Armed with a fork for poking and a knife for parrying, you stalk the corridors of this first-person Game Boy crawler while a hunger bar ticks down. Every encounter is a fight against sentient snacks: upside-down ice-cream cones, marauding hamburgers, even rogue bowls of ramen. Time your stab-and-block rhythm when a sprite flashes, devour the fallen food, and watch the meter refill with crunchy satisfaction. Navigation delivers the real bite: seven mazelike floors, each sign-posted by skeletal hints—“exit lies northeast,” “follow the critters”—that force you to sprint, backtrack, and spare enemies for a return snack. Difficulty skews toward orientation rather than combat, keeping the 40-minute quest lively instead of punishing. Fans of monster-meals will spot echoes of the anime Delicious in Dungeon, but this keeps the seasoning light and the pixels bold, deliciously so.

Honey jars, pumpkins, balloons—whatever the buddies ask for, you’re the courier in this cheerful scroller that runs on a stock Amiga 500. Across thirty-plus levels you leap, duck and loose arrows while the screen pans horizontally, then vertically, revealing pockets of secrets behind chunky pixels. Arrows multitask: they down walking bombs, flip stone-faced switches and conjure invisible brick platforms once outlined squares—or total blanks—are pinged. Quivers grant only ten shots, so every pull of the bow feels like budgeting candy at Halloween. Still, the level design rarely punishes experimentation; many critters can be squished Mario-style, and stray arrows seldom soft-lock progress. The real challenge lies in exploration: sniffing out that last honey jar by hunching there’s a hidden platform hanging in mid-air, then carting everything back to the quest giver for the exit key. It’s simple, colourful and proudly old-school, echoing retro collect-athons while sparking playful Who Games personality throughout.

Crackling CRT scanlines barely contain the menace aboard the Achilles, where engineer Ashley Smith wakes to corridors crawling with xenomorphs and face-hugger jump-scares that still make you flinch. Built in just two weeks on the Delta Shadow engine—and winner of the ZX Dev MIA competition—it squeezes impressive detail from the modest ZX Spectrum 128k (a souped-up Next build exists too). Flip-screen rooms form a single, gated maze: terminals open blast doors, while whirring fans and venting gas can be weaponised against the aliens if your reflexes co-operate. Limited bullets and grenades demand constant scrambles to lockers; running dry feels as stressful as the pulsing black-and-red reactor finale. The lone chiptune is catchy rather than brooding, yet after half an hour of tension you may dial it down