One of the most endearing graphical styles on the console, mechanically strange, and mysteriously laid out. The music is both religiously exalting and playful, perfectly matching its dungeon. High ranking on the console's must-play for its clear-eyed color-deliberated style commitment and consistent quality. The rogueish runs delving deeper into the dungeon all lending to its whole hearted selling of exploratory orb-gazing magehood. Despite this, its generally endearing self struggle with the hardware comes into antagonism with the player in its platforming at times, and so one may benefit from a save-state playthrough. All this, however, the seemingly requisite comically asinine hot-girl-retrieval story and suspicious goblin design tropes make the already hammy setting perhaps too self indulgent for the designers. A more esoteric setup or total removal of any setup would have better served as wrapping of dungeon navigating. The plot, as is custom, serves as gristle.

Music highlight. Tim Follin, you can't save this. I can promise though, I sunk a good few hours in because the OST is great.

Really telling that this is sitting at a cool 6/10 despite most people likely never figuring out what the potions did (essential) or how to jump-grab or drop-jump. Not a single mention of the nearly frame-perfect waiting sections with oscillating spike-balls, the spawn-in death traps, or the borderline item softlock (I elaborate on this one in the description)

I'm a Zelda II defender (4/10) and I love Mike Tyson's Punch-Out!! (8/10) for its masterfully tight design and satisfyingly brutal difficulty, but every other chamber in Solstice by comparison is full of "gotchas" and absurdly tight windows that are made worse by the isometric view obfuscating their actual location. You can infer a lot of locational stuff, but only so much; there's a reason platformers nearly entirely avoided this perspective even back in the day, opting for either top-down or side-view.

I can't help but feel like you're better off playing one of the adventure games of the 80s and 90s instead if you want a "vibes-based exercise in trial and error."

An isometric puzzler for the NES, pretty decent. Frequently I would tend to have issues in being able to figure out depth in this one though, often I would position myself specifically onto one square, ready to leap to the next, only to plummet to my death as my depth perception was entirely warped. Which is incredibly annoying with this game's rather strict life system, and while I am usually alright with live systems, especially in these older titles, revisiting areas after being set back in this game simply feel like a chore, especially the literal labyrinths you're forced to endure at points. I can see the vision, when you die you are forced to do the puzzles again meaning you are forced to memorise them more so theoretically once you master this game you can breeze right through every single part of the game without a second thought since you will have been forced to blitz each part after dying. The way continues work is that they are more like checkpoints, once you get a continue, you continue from where you collected it, but only for that ONE continue you got, if you game over again, you will then start from the place where you picked up your PREVIOUS continue. Meaning if you get at a particularly hard section and game over twice, you get kicked all the way back down the stairs even further (Metaphorically speaking), this is just rage quit inducing as it feels like the game truly is just wasting your time, and truthfully it's most likely because it is, the game is relatively short once you know where to go and how to solve the puzzles.

The main thing of note with this game is the soundtrack, as it is made by the spectacular Tim Follin, so really, your better off just sitting at the title screen watching the intro on loop, listening to those kick-ass beats.

An extra star because it's MUCH shorter than Equinox.

Another entry in my ongoing "American covers are goofy as hell and Japanese covers tend to understand or respect the game far more than we ever do" research. An action puzzler with a little wizard in a fun medieval dungeon with cool Escher vibes, with the back of the box copy right there saying "non-violent fun for the entire family!", and what do my guys in the US do? Put him on the cover with a Groundskeeper Willie-ass six pack and pecs that can crush an empty beer can. He's not even shirtless in the game, guys! "Whatever you do, don't make Shadax the old friendly wizard look gay. No kids will buy this quirky puzzle game unless we make the main character look like the guy my wife told me not to worry about." Meanwhile, look at the Famicom cover. Look at it! On the other hand, I can see the problem here, as the Japanese cover makes the game look far cooler than, erm, it actually is. Surely, though, there must be a golden mean between setting up unreasonable expectations and fuckin Beefslab McJohnson up there?