4/5 ★ – jdraco's review of Panel de Pon.

Panel De Pon is the best puzzle game since Tetris Now I know that that’s a bold claim to make, but I’m serious, the gameplay and concept of this game is so simple, yet so genius And if you’ve read my Tetris review then you know that if a puzzle game can be simple but also have genius concept, then it easily gets 5 good noodle stars from me But what makes this game so genius you may be asking, or, what do you do in this game, you may also be asking, or you may even be asking, what does Panel De Pon even mean? Well, shut the fuck up and I’m gonna answer all of those questions So to start off by answering the last question, I’m not really sure. I looked it up and apparently it means “Pong in the Panels” which honestly doesn’t even really make sense to me at all and I actually played the game and know what it’s about But then I also tried to translate Panel De Pon from Japanese on google translate, but instead it made me translate it from Spanish, and it translated to “Pon Panel” So I don’t know really what the hell Panel De Pon means, but that’s not important What is important though is the gameplay, because the gameplay is what makes the game, it’s the beating heart, the lifeforce, if the gameplay is shit, the game is shit, simple as that And I’m happy to say that the gameplay of this game is incredible, and the reason that it’s incredible, is because all that you do in this game is move blocks left and right, that’s it Yeah the gameplay of this game consists of moving blocks left and right to try and align 3 blocks with the same color all in a row And it doesn’t just have to be 3 in a row, sometimes you can get 4 in a row, 5 in a row, 6 and even 7, although I only got 7 in a row a few times, but it still can happen And it’s so fun and so incredibly satisfying when you have the perfect strategy and perfect setup in order to clear 4 or 5 blocks in a row and then after setting it up for multiple turns, you finally get to just clear away all those blocks It’s amazing, and what’s even better is that when you clear 4 or more blocks in a row, the blocks completely freeze for a few seconds giving you time to look at your board and see potential moves that can make to clear more blocks It’s genius And speaking of the blocks freezing, I will point out, because I didn’t mention it yet, but you’re essentially on a timer to clear as many blocks as possible Because the blocks are always moving towards the top of the screen, and if they touch the top, then it’s game over And this is good in providing an urgency to the player and making them look at the board more carefully while also keeping in mind a level of pace that they have to keep up with However I will say that I do have a problem with the blocks moving up towards the top, but I’ll touch on it later Back to the praise though, I absolutely love how just the simple concept of moving blocks left and right to match up three blocks in a row can have so many intricate ways of execution I honestly want to watch a speedrun of this game after I write this review, because being able to glimpse at the screen for a like 2 seconds and process all the potential moves to make must be insane But a second ago when I said that there are many intricate ways of executing the alignment of 3 blocks in a row, I meant it Because you can line then up from side to side, line them up vertically, you can push a block down into an empty space and then push a same color block on top of that one and then do that until you have three in a row, or maybe you can push a block down onto a lower level and then once it’s on that lower level, maybe then you can match it up with 2 other same color blocks that may have been inaccessible to match up with before dropping the higher block on to that lower level And that whole stroke of words that I just typed out barely scratch the surface of things that you can do in this game, I mean the sky's the limit, whatever way that you can possibly think of to align 3 of the same color blocks in a row, you can most likely do And, I’ll say it again, It’s fucking genius There’s some minor things in this game too that I also really like For starters the music is good, I like that the game gives you a demo mode to practice on and hone your skills a little better, and I love that before just playing a few rounds you’re able to adjust the speed that you want it to be, what difficulty you want the game to be on, etc And there are probably more customization options in this game, but this game is in Japanese, and last time I checked, I am not Japanese, nor can I read/speak the Japanese language It honestly sucks too because there are probably a good amount things that I missed out on playing/experiencing in this game simply because I can’t read Japanese I also wasn’t able to understand what the characters were saying in the Stage Clear Mode And Stage Clear Mode is essentially just the story mode of the game, that has 6 different levels and then a final boss at the end that pretty much just looks like a knockoff version of the beast from Beauty and the Beast So yeah, the Stage Clear Mode didn’t make a lot of sense to me, but it was still good and I did enjoy it a lot… Until I got to level 5 Because you see, once you get to level 5, the speed at which the blocks go towards the top of the screen becomes fucking insane and borderline unplayable I am so fucking glad that I came across the game on Nintendo Switch Online Because NSO has a rewind feature for all of its games, and if I didn’t have that feature, then I wouldn’t have been able to beat the first level of level 5 Because the screen scrolls by at such an immense speed that my brain literally doesn’t even have 5 seconds to process what I’m looking at before the blocks hit the top and I lose You seriously have to be a fucking NASA supercomputer in order to process everything on screen in the amount of time that the game gives you It is fucking insane I literally got to a point where after every single move that I made I would hold down both the triggers to stop the game with rewind feature, scan the screen for the next few moves that I can make, then I would make those moves and then I would stop the game again and just continue to do that until I beat the level That’s how I had to play this game And it was fucking bullshit And the thing too is that even with the rewind feature and being able to pause and look at moves to make, you can still lose, because you have to be so fucking precise and exact with almost every move that you make in the later levels It just fucking sucks I hate it And that’s really the only thing that I don’t like about this game, but it’s such a shame because I actually would want to play through Stage Clear Mode again, but I just don’t know if I can put myself through that once more But with that all being said, this game is still very good, and again the scrolling speed in the later levels of stage clear is really my only flaw with the game As it stands though this still one of the best puzzle games ever made in my opinion And it’s even better to me because I discovered it out of the blue while scrolling through Nintendo Switch Online Seriously I don’t even know what possessed me to click on this game, but I’m glad that I did So I’m gonna give this game a crisp, 4/5