Very cool and investing experience, I’ve always been a big fan of ethereal mind fuck media and this scratches that itch for sure. It really takes this concept of a subway with infinite rooms that could literally have anything in them as far as it can, with a large variety in set pieces and puzzles.

It also does that cool horror game thing where it’s not constantly shoving lore into your face on a casual playthrough, but the more you dig into it the more you find it, that’s really cool I like that a lot. The fact you need to get the secret ending by starting the game at midnight after getting the good ending is so insanely cool, and the multiple endings are satisfying to get. Though I was only able to get the good ending by continuing right after a bad end playthrough, so quitting the game after getting the bad end meant I had to replay the entire game again, which was really annoying. Though this also could’ve just been an issue on my end, and also I do really appreciate how the good ending route only makes you replay the stuff you’ve missed.

Still though the stuff you gotta do to get the true ending is kind of hard to figure out without a guide, and I’d imagine that replaying constantly just to finally get it can get insanely tedious, especially with the slow movement speed.

I do also think that some of the scares are kind of cheap, most of them are pretty consistently well done but when it throws in a lame “GRAAAAH!” type one out of nowhere it’s pretty 😐 you know. Plus I wasn’t a fan of how tedious and trial-and-error-y some of the puzzles were, the gallery picture one and the blue cube ones felt padded and lame.

However, Subway Midnight isn’t really something you go to for the gameplay. You go to it for the interesting characters and scenarios you get faced with, and it does that stuff insanely well.

Man I was disappointed by this one, it had a lot going for it. I like the characters a lot, the art style is great, and the Fever gameplay is genuinely very fun. But in terms of core Puyo content this is probably my least favorite of the series so far. For one the Gamecube may be the single worst console to have a Puyo Puyo game on, as much as I love using that controller it is total hell for Puyo. Whether you use the sensitive stick or the tiny ass d-pad you will constantly have your Puyo placements be completely fucked up, without it ever really feeling like your fault. Also it’s by a mile the most frustrating game of the series yet. The original ones got pretty difficult at times, but it still felt pretty fair. If you used a continue, it felt like it’d get a bit lighter to handle, and it was a great system. You have the option to use continues, but you can also avoid using them to get a more challenging and more rewarding experience. Here though, it doesn’t matter whether you use continues or not some of the CPUs are damn near impossible to beat. Even on the normal difficulty there were matches that felt like dumb luck whether I’d win them or not, and using continues doesn’t make them any easier. I genuinely think forcing someone to beat this game without using any continues could be a method of torture. Not to mention as cool as the Fever stuff is, but the CPUs manage to fuck that up too. I swear every time I’d get Fever mode, the CPU would just get it right after me and cancel out anything I’m doing, without fail. I don’t mind the challenge this game presents, but I feel like the difficulty in Puyo should have some trade off to it. You can make the game easier, but at the expense of a lower score. This game just gets infuriating and forces you to trudge through it whether you want to or not.