Starting Four Sided Fantasy, it immediately hit me with a wave of nostalgia with its puzzle-platformer gameplay and slightly wistful and melancholy dialogue-free story; it felt like stepping back into 2010 when games of this type (both structurally and narratively) were the primary output of the Indie sphere, following the likes of Braid, Fez, and Limbo. I don't mean for this to sound like I'm denigrating Four Sided Fantasy for being behind the curve, though I'm sure I've seen all its tricks before. It's more that games like Four Sided Fantasy have mostly vanished and endless roguelikes (the hottest trend if 2020 hits like Spelunky 2, Hades, and Rogue Legacy 2 are any indication), survival sims, and even my beloved explormers have all but supplanted them. Felt kinda nice to step back a decade, when the world wasn't quite as on fire as it is now.

Four Sided Fantasy's primary feature, or gimmick if you'd like, is the player's ability to "pause" the side-scrolling platformer which causes the screen's edges to become portals to their opposite sides. Like if you stopped the camera in Super Mario Bros. and Mario kept on walking off the right edge of the screen, only to reappear on the left. Naturally, the obstacles the game throws at you are designed to be overcome with this feature: a sudden wall stops your progress, until you pause the scrolling, turn back, and end up on the opposite side of the screen behind the wall, at which point you can then unpause and resume your trek eastwards. As the game passes through the seasons, more tricks are introduced: eventually your second character (the two alternate with every warp) starts walking across the ceiling instead, and later still they'll appear in a background layer in a fashion similar to Mutant Mudds or the more recent Donkey Kong Country Returns games. The game implicitly suggests that the two characters, a man and a woman, are lovers who are kept apart by circumstances beyond their control, symbolically represented in-game as their inability to manifest in the same place at the same time. Beyond that, you're left to piece together most of what's happening yourself, from the scratchy VCR effects to how you seem to be cycling through a whole year's worth of seasons.

What I appreciated about Four Sided Fantasy, and I'm not certain this won't read like a subtle knock against it, is the way I was able to breeze through the game. The puzzles can demand a certain amount of precision at times (though certainly not to the extent of a masocore like Celeste or Super Meat Boy) but there's a point about ten to twenty minutes in after facing enough of these distinct screen-wrapping puzzles that you get a feel for what the game wants and the "off screen" direction it wants you to take, whether it's left, right, down, or up. Once that point has passed, you find yourself gliding through the puzzles and feeling like a genius while doing so, which I think speaks more to the game's intuitive approach and how the player is able to quickly internalize new rules on the fly. You could also say that the game's too easy and shies away from genuine brainteasers either because of the limitations of this central feature or a desire not to tax the player too much given the game's gentle, casual tone. It might also just be I became a super genius overnight without realizing, though given I almost forgot to take the trash out today despite being reminded twice I'm quite sure that isn't the case. Either way, the game hit the right wavelength for me and though it made the game a bit shorter - and it was already short, with a HowLongToBeat estimate somewhere around two hours - that smooth as butter progression made for a relaxing way to spend the afternoon. I might suggest that the platforming was a bit too momentum-heavy for my liking at times, but that may well have been lag introduced by a weaker laptop PC struggling with the game's bloomy visual effects.

I occasionally like to revisit the puzzle-platformer genre to appreciate the roots of the Indie movement, even if it's moved onto other things by now, and while Four Sided Fantasy perhaps isn't anything too new it's not something that carries a lot of negatives either. I appreciate that it still had tricks to show off even towards the game's conclusion, including the visual mindscrew that caps the game, and a little touch of ambiguity to its message and narrative. Inventive, off-beat, yet brief and ephemeral; it is the type of experience that the Indie market has always been adept at producing.

Rating: 4 out of 5.

Great, concise review! I also feel that a certain 'breezability' and short length is enjoyable, even refreshing. "You can beat it in 2 hours" is a plus for me at this point. More movie-length games, please!