Thanks to Grimtalin for the review code

Title: The Fall of Elena Temple
System: Nintendo Switch (eShop)
Price: $3.99
Release Date: 04/30/2024

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Story

In this LCD-inspired puzzler, you take control of Elena Temple on yet another adventure, as she explores some ruins with the power of time reversal! Stages have plenty of comedic banter and hints to give, but of course, this ain’t a game you play for the plot. Thankfully, the hints don’t repeat if you die in a stage, so the banter doesn’t overstay its welcome.

Presentation

Gotta be honest, at first when I saw the screenshots of this game, I was convinced it was a port from the Playdate; the color scheme of the yellow bordered GrimBoy looks almost identical to one! And indeed, it just so happens to be a Playdate port, following in similar LCD inspirations to what the last Elena game did. This one feels a little more akin to the Game & Watch series of handhelds, since Elena moves tile by tile here, versus being able to freely move around a 2D plane like last time. Either way, you get a really neat border and can zoom the screen in as you wish, leaving to a very fun visual throwback!

Throughout the game, you also unlock extra backgrounds for the scenery present behind the Grimboy. However, as pretty as these backgrounds are, (having a nice filter applied over them, and the locales all being various places you’d ideally take a handheld console to play) I mostly played with the camera fully zoomed into the screen, which pretty much obscures them. Still, there’s a good variety here to play with if you wish to have a background visible.

The music is also far, far better than I expected, and definitely not akin to the simple visuals. These are a good variety of electronic tunes that play on each stage, and some of them are pretty darn good and catchy, while others such as the first stage song can drone on and on. You can disable the music outright if you want to try and make it authentic to a LCD handheld, but I liked most of what I heard here, and happily left the BGM on.

Gameplay

In The Fall of Elena Temple, your main objective in each stage is to collect every single coin in a level and make it to the exit without getting hurt! These are all single screen puzzles, and quickly you’ll be taught how to use the game’s central gimmick of a Time Crystal, which gives Elena the power to go back to right before she fell off a platform. Depending on the stage, these crystals have different amounts of charges, and once you run out, the first fall point gets replaced by the next one, so if say, Elena has five rewinds available, you can fall five times and then hit the B button until you’re back to right before your first fall!

This is where the puzzling shines, since items you collected, enemies you defeated, and doors you opened all remain that way upon using the time crystal. Due to the nature of the levels and Elena’s very limited movement, (being unable to do anything else besides move and jump straight up, really) you will more than likely fall to a place you can’t get out of, thus warranting a rewind. But if you get hasty and waste your falls, or cross a bridge, it breaks, and you rewind to right before the bridge broke… You still will be stuck even with the rewinds. Likewise, you can grab a heart to tank a hit, but you cannot carry more than one of these at a time, and rewinding doesn’t bring it back.

Thus, falling in the right order, making note of the best routes to fall and rewind without getting yourself stuck, and most importantly making sure you can reach the exit upon getting all the gold coins are the keys to victory! And honestly, despite the main game being 20 stages, (with a few extra bonus levels thrown in) this one was a delightfully tricky time. Even by the eighth stage, I had moments I got stumped and needed to restart a level several times.

The only big gripe I had with Fall was related to the act of restarting, since every time you wish to do so, you must pause the game and hit restart from the main menu. Adding some sort of quick restart button to something such as say, the minus button would help wonders for reducing the tedium. Otherwise though, I enjoyed my time going through Fall of Elena Temple, even when I hit several walls along the way, they were still plenty of fun to get past in the end once I finally figured out an ah-ha moment.

Conclusion

It’s been a long while since we’ve seen Elena, but having enjoyed her prior adventure, I’m more than happy to say I enjoyed this puzzly one a lot as well. Each room is devious and tricky, but oh so satisfying to solve, with the game’s seemingly super short length being offset by a lot of well-made puzzles that’ll take you quite a bit to figure out on your own. The simple mechanics and great pick up and play nature really do make this a fun ode to the handheld systems.

Really when my biggest gripe with Fall is the lack of a quick restart feature, I don’t have much else to complain about. Yeah, the game will be short once you figure out the hang of it and clear all the levels, but with it being short and sweet, I don’t think that’s a bad thing, especially for the price. I’m already wishing for more of this fun puzzle adventure!

I give The Fall of Elena Temple a 7 a out of 10.