Blinx: The Time Sweeper (Patreon)

The Gameboy has a plethora of 2D games, a handful of 3D games, but only a single 4D game... Blinx the Time Sweeper!

Ending 2022 with Balan Wonderworld, a game where one of the producers and artists was Naoto Ohshima, to kicking off 2023 with Blinx: The Time Sweeper, which was directed by Naoto Ohshima, makes for a nice inverse bookending! 

So yes, Blinx, a game I had for nearly two decades thought was a collectathon platformer akin to Banjo Kazooie or even more of the actiony platformer types of Jak and Daxter or Ratchet and Clank. I was in fact surprised to find out thanks to catching a stream of the game by Altermentality that this was nothing like the collectathon games I was comparing it to! 

No, instead Blinx throws you into levels with the goal of completing it within 10 minutes and is a much more arcadey fair! I do wonder if stylising it as more like Sunshine/kazooie would have done the game any better, or if that's just a "it would have been better because *I* like collectathon platformers" 

Food for thought! 

Either way the game has really solid art direction and I'm always a fan of games that use time not only in mechanics but also story.