A very short game (at least, potentially - I beat it in about an hour, but of course that's just to see ONE of the endings), but an exhilarating one. At first I got pinned between two monsters and mercilessly killed, and I thought, hmm... what's up with that? But after getting familiar with the game for a second, I was beyond hooked.

Because your pickups are randomised, you never know quite whether you'll be mauled to death immediately, or speed through the level with an expertly swift key grab like some kind of gaming genius. And therein lies the addictive anticipation. If I play enough, I know I will be getting my slam dunk soon. And when it comes, it feels so good.

I also just, of course, am a sucker for a spooky type game in the beautiful macabre Virtual Boy palette of deep, dark reds. It's a console so ready-made for horror that this game is a real thrill on that basis alone.

It's a simple game, but one crafted to perfection. I love the password screen, the biblical undertones fed through the level passwords themselves, the freakish, scratchy monsters, and that great sense of confusion that comes from traversing each maze-like level in a desperate, hurried search for orbs and keys.

When I first saw the level tree after finding the first level's door, it was such a great moment of revelation. Oh my god, I thought, look at all these levels... look at all these endings!

I'll be playing through this one again. Let me in that nasty yakata †.

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† editor's note: yakata means mansion

The best thing on the Virtual Boy, no contest. It's a really stiff dungeon crawler that forces the player to learn routes, replay levels, and obsess over resources to succeed. It also features a first-person shooting mechanic that's straight-up incredible for the hardware? Combine that with the beautiful sprites and cutscenes and Innsmouth is an experience that will stick with you for reasons other than JUST the eye-damage you'll sustain from the all-red visuals within the headset. BIG recommend.

Virtual Boy Complete - Game #6

I was looking forward to this, a Virtual Boy horror game? Sounds like a match made in heaven (or hell, I guess. Horror and all) - unfortunately, the only scary thing about this game is the RNG. It's essentially a psuedo-3D maze game, think 3D Monster Maze, with a bit of FPS thrown in - you're in a big mansion filled with doors, and have to collects bullets, keys, and orbs. Bullets are well, bullets; keys are well, keys; and orbs show you areas on the pause map. As I mentioned earlier, these are placed with RNG. The bullet system works as it should (though I'll get to my thoughts on the shooting controls and monsters later), but the keys and orbs are both handled a bit poorly.

The keys open locked doors, as a key should - the thing is, locked doors have no visual signifiers. Just a random door from the stage gets labeled as "the locked door", so you can't enter without a key, and entering it with a key clears the level. This is fine when you've got an orb, but the problem is that often times they'll appear early into a floor, so you'll either clear a stage very quickly, or you'll find it without an orb or key, and then have no way of knowing which way to go back when you have the key, and waste the very short time you have trying to pick up an orb you really wouldn't need if the game was designed a slight bit better - not helped at all by the fact that none of the rooms in this game are distinct from one another, so backtracking without an orb is absolutely impossible.

This is a twin-stick shooter, but has no real reason to be. The corridors are cramped and the monsters are big, so there's only really two areas of the screen you'll need to shoot, and they don't attack frequently enough to where there's much reason to keep distance.

Another thing I mentioned going into this, and probably the most damning flaw, is: the game's not scary! The enemy designs don't feel intimidating, you can hear their footsteps even when they're not nearby, they're completely silent once they approach, and they're all just too frequent and easily disposed of to really take you by surprise. There's a lot of potential for horror settings on the VB, with its bizarre blood-red-on-a-night-sky colours, but as mentioned eariler, it's just the same hotel room over and over. If you could get through an identical hotel floor on stage 1, it's not too hard to believe you could get through the same hotel floor on stage 4.