This game owns. It's a dinky little puzzler which weighs in at a grand total of 2.5Mb, and it's one of the best games of the year so far.

Leaf's Odyssey is in whatever puzzle game genre the DROD series is in. Each puzzle room is an arena where you need to kill every monster to progress. But many monsters are well-guarded, so the puzzle is how to use the unique traits of each monster and the environment to your advantage. As a simple early example, one monster explodes when you approach it, but perhaps that explosion is the only thing that can reach another monster which is guarded by fences, meaning you'll have to lure that first monster into the right position before killing it.

The puzzle design is fabulous. Almost every room focuses on a different interaction between puzzle elements, and almost every puzzle is a winner. They have that quality of being obviously totally impossible until you spot the one little thread to pull that unravels the whole thing.

DROD is cited as a direct inspiration in the credits, and Leaf's Odyssey borrows many of its best quality-of-life features. You can mouse over the screen to inspect what exactly is on each tile and check what switches open what doors; you can rewind indefinitely to where you made a mistake; you can even browse recordings of your successful solves, so you can see how exactly you solved a puzzle if your friend needs a hint.

Leaf's Odyssey loses energy towards the end, when the progression becomes entirely linear and the puzzles become exhausting multi-step contraptions which layer tricks and traps upon each other. Otherwise, this is a fantastic, hugely satisfying puzzler which will put up a fight for a good 10-15 hours.

Again: 2.5Mb. In an age when AAA gaming companies want 300Gb for an update, it almost feels miraculous.

I've been very slowly working through the Kingdom Hearts games, or at least the ones in the HD re-releases. This one is about Sora and Riku learning how to use the weapons they've been using for the last six games. Both are playable, and the game pushes you to switch between the two to progress their separate paths simultaneously. Dream Drop Distance is cruel enough to provide recaps of the previous games, giving you false hope of understanding what's going on this time, before ripping it away again by introducing a brand new plot mechanism in the last few hours as if everyone had always known about it. God I love Kingdom Hearts' storytelling.

It wouldn't be a Kingdom Hearts spinoff if it didn't swing for the fences with big gameplay ideas that don't work very well. Dream Drop Distance has two of these. First, there's the Flowmotion gimmick, which in theory lets you incorporate fluid parkour-like moves into combat, but in practice sees you spamming the wall-jump attack over and over because it's the only Flowmotion attack which works reliably.

Second, there's this monster-crafting gimmick where you make friendly versions of this game's enemies, the Dream Eaters, to fight as party members. There's all sorts of gauges and ability trees to max out, and you can play with and feed the monsters to boost your stats, but it all feels like busywork after a while. Unlocking branches in the ability trees is opaque, and many of the monsters have long happy-dancing animations that slow down the process of tending to them, and the playtime minigames just kinda suck, and so on. All these little annoyances add up. Maybe it feels worse because you're stuck with Dream Eaters rather than the classic Heartless monsters. I'd rather feed cakes and treats to one of those jangly knight guys from the first game than to whatever the hell a Hebby Repp is.

Apart from all that, though, this is a perfectly fine game. The Kingdom Hearts gameplay fundamentals remain sound. This one has an interesting selection of worlds, with those in the back half of the game being especially enjoyable. The boss battles are always a highlight in Kingdom Hearts - I'll give special mention to Sora's gorilla fight in Traverse Town, his one-on-one duel at the end of The Grid, and the clusterfuck Pete and Beagle Boy fights.

And, well, at the end of the day I'm not immune to stupid Disney shit. Who can resist the allure of beating up Pete with a giant key?