This week's game is Peke to Poko no Daruman Busters, a Game Boy puzzle game that has you chucking blocks all over the place to try and stop the Darumen from getting to your friend Nana.
It's something of an interesting concept, especially with how it has you coordinating two characters who move in unison, but my goodness is this game incredibly taxing to play! It's a relentlessly challenging game that expects you to work around its many odd rules and unpredictable design choices. All it takes is two blocks to make a match, but you gotta do it in certain ways or else it doesn't count. The side columns always have things for you to toss and tell you what's coming up, but the five columns in the middle spawn blocks at random, constantly getting in your way and changing speeds between levels even though you selected a tempo at the start. The Daruman moves around the stage unpredictably, making your life harder for reasons you can't fully discern. It's a lot to take in and it kinda stressed me out! If the game was more clear on how to efficiently play it or even just offered more audiovisual variety, it'd be a lot easier to get into because it's a cute game, but it comes hard to recommend because of how little incentive there is to explore it for how challenging and harsh it is.
I found a claim that the two main characters are based on mascots for a confectionery company called Fujiya, but upon looking up their website, I found that their mascots were named "Peko and Poko", not "Peke and Poko", and the game itself has zero allusions or references to the brand or confections in general. Even after lots of digging around, I couldn't find anything that backed up this claim. If anyone happens to know anything about this, please do let me know because I'm really curious!