Hit "random" on RetroArch and it came up with Equinox ( #snes ), which is the sequel to classic isometric #nes dungeon-crawl Solstice, a game that befuddled me in my youth but in my mid-age dotage I recently took the time to play through completely. I had always wondered about this sequel, so I hit "play" on Equinox.
It's ... kind of a hot mess. The game opens on a splash screen that looks like it was made with MS Paint, playing simple music that sounds like some DOS game from 10 years earlier. Click "Start", and there's no story intro, no control guide, you just get dumped onto a heavily pixelated overworld map being chased around by yellow monkey monsters and flying bat things.
OK, great, so what can you do? At the start, two things and two things alone: Play a harp, and jump super high. These abilities appear to do literally nothing, at least at the beginning.
If you're not attacked by the spastic enemy sprites running around the overland map, you can eventually figure out that you need to jump into beehive-looking structures sprouting from the ground, wherein the *actual* game takes place. This is a series of interconnected dungeons, where you have to solve puzzles and collect various keys and potions, similar to the original Solstice game, but with the key difference that you can actually get weapons to fight the various dungeon ghosts and creatures.
Anyway I've gotten to the 2nd world and definitely starting to hit the wall of non-obvious puzzle solutions, so maybe I'll play around with it a bit more, but overall it's still a bit "mid." It has the feeling of a half-finished game, certain sprites and graphics are richly detailed taking advantage of the 16-bit SNES, but then the overland map and intro screen look almost sub-8-bit.
#retrogaming #review
npub147…paq44
2026-08-25 22:12:51 UTC
Author Public Key
npub147fp2j606qpfysp38phhzvempt7ewsdqwm6uww9uycp6tdvavu0s5paq44Published at
2026-08-25 22:12:51 UTCEvent JSON
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"content": "Hit \"random\" on RetroArch and it came up with Equinox ( #snes ), which is the sequel to classic isometric #nes dungeon-crawl Solstice, a game that befuddled me in my youth but in my mid-age dotage I recently took the time to play through completely. I had always wondered about this sequel, so I hit \"play\" on Equinox.\n\nIt's ... kind of a hot mess. The game opens on a splash screen that looks like it was made with MS Paint, playing simple music that sounds like some DOS game from 10 years earlier. Click \"Start\", and there's no story intro, no control guide, you just get dumped onto a heavily pixelated overworld map being chased around by yellow monkey monsters and flying bat things.\n\nOK, great, so what can you do? At the start, two things and two things alone: Play a harp, and jump super high. These abilities appear to do literally nothing, at least at the beginning. \n\nIf you're not attacked by the spastic enemy sprites running around the overland map, you can eventually figure out that you need to jump into beehive-looking structures sprouting from the ground, wherein the *actual* game takes place. This is a series of interconnected dungeons, where you have to solve puzzles and collect various keys and potions, similar to the original Solstice game, but with the key difference that you can actually get weapons to fight the various dungeon ghosts and creatures.\n\nAnyway I've gotten to the 2nd world and definitely starting to hit the wall of non-obvious puzzle solutions, so maybe I'll play around with it a bit more, but overall it's still a bit \"mid.\" It has the feeling of a half-finished game, certain sprites and graphics are richly detailed taking advantage of the 16-bit SNES, but then the overland map and intro screen look almost sub-8-bit.\n\n#retrogaming #review",
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