Just completed the "quest mode" of M2's Gauntlet for the Megadrive, also confusingly known as "Gauntlet 4", for some reason in lieu of a perfectly apt title (perhaps as a spoiler guard?) revealed in the credits - Gauntlet: The Castle of Succession.
My interest was piqued when I heard it described as a unique puzzle action hybrid. What did they mean by this?
Well, to elaborate, turns out they meant that the way the player progresses through dungeon floors feels a bit like solving a tile puzzle. Mostly due to the fact that each dungeon is made up floors, each a clever arrangement of the same set of tiles as any other, plus an additional gimmick tile specific to the dungeon. These include traversable tiles with various rules (e.g. no-magic, no-shot), destructible walls, non-destructible walls, trap tiles that remove non-destructible walls and manipulable teleporters. The enemies too, are quite tile-like, basically flood filling all points they can reach from their generators, but also kind of magnetized towards the player character. Killing one enemy shifts all the others, giving a visual effect similar to a moving tile puzzle. Only ranged enemies and certain mimics differ in behavior, the former only moving towards the player till they're in range to attack, and the latter trying to escape the player. The result is that even in the small, the player is constantly configuring the dungeon floor such as to create a favorable arrangement for them to move through unscathed. All that said, it's still, fundamentally, a top down character action game, not Tetris.
There are 5 dungeons of 10 floors in total, the first four of which can be completed in any order. Each ends with a fight against a dragon as a boss, each being more or less the same, differing only by the attacks available to them and their ferocity (and also perhaps by color? I forget), depending on the order in which the player challenges them. The final dragon has the additional gimmick of being invincible, with the player being able to earn a short time window in which they can deal damage, by temporarily disabling 4 seals. Personally, I found the bosses difficult, but surmountable after a bit of save state practice gave me a sense of rhythm for the action. Watching other people's runs on YT after the fact, I could see that there are pixel perfect safe spots, but unless abusing those, I can't imagine no-damaging the dragons. Especially so as you fight each one (except the last) on the corresponding dungeon's movement affecting gimmick tiles.
Quest mode has character building. Players accumulate XP (IIRC called EP) which they can use to increase stats individually, and gold which they can use to buy equipment, which also increases stats, or provides a particular gimmick. 80% of the player's character building will be keeping up with the scaling (every subsequent dungeon seems to have stronger enemies, and also gives more XP and gold), and, in my experience, by the end I had 3 out of 6 stats maxed and all equipment purchased anyway. The other 20% is prioritization and economizing along the way. Notably certain equipment (float ring, mirror ring) and certain stats (speed, since the camera affects teleporter behavior, and high speed lets the player race the camera) open up different paths through the levels, giving the player tactical advantages beyond the simple numbers race. I'm not sure quest mode can be played multiplayer, but there are a number of possibilities of specialization if so.
The final screen showed my play time as 7 hours 20-something minutes, and my number of deaths as 7, which doesn't include the dozens of times I died practicing the bosses, and the time I spent on that (although it does include each inevitably failed first attempt). There seems to be no penalty for death? I did notice one time after I died, I lost the various stat bonuses gifted for defeating the dragons, but it was more of a nuisance than anything as I simply took the shortcuts back to the top (or bottom, as the case may be) of the dungeons to pick them up again.
As an arcade port, I can't say much, as I never played the original, neither did I play the arcade mode available here. Nor the record mode, for that matter. I trust it's all faithful, or at least very much so in the spirit of the original, as the game is by M2. Certainly you could feel a lot of care went into the quest mode.
I like the visuals. For some reason, they remind me of the first Warcraft game. The music is excellent, the fire dungeon theme sounding like a proto-Radiant Silvergun, another puzzle action game, of sorts, with which this game shares a composer, behold:
