The Fall of Elena Temple

Genre: Puzzle-Platformer

Players: 1

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Review:

After The Adventures of Elena Temple in 2018, I can imagine the game’s creator looking back at what worked in that game and what didn’t. What worked was clearly the great puzzle design, the retro charm, and the playful tongue-in-cheek tone. What didn’t were the Platforming and the Metroidvania-esque labyrinthine level design. So when it came time to follow the game up with a sequel, it abandons the elements that didn’t work so well, and doubles down on what did. And the result is actually pretty good.

The Fall of Elena Temple is a Puzzle-Platformer released in 2024 on PC, PlayStation 5, Xbox One, and Nintendo Switch. The Indiana Jones-like Elena Temple has once again found herself invading a tomb in search of riches and possibly biting off more than she can chew. This time, the tomb in question is filled with “quantum crystals” that allow Elena to teleport back to the last 3-5 platforms she’s jumped from, a nifty tool she’ll need to collect all the floating coins in each room so she can escape.

Where the previous game was depicted as being played on various fictional 4-color retro gaming platforms, Fall has the entire game playing on just one, the 2-color black and white-screened “GrimBoy”, with visuals so simple it could have been a halfway point between the Game & Watch or Tiger Electronics LCD handheld devices and the original Game Boy.

This means you’ll be looking at extremely simple monochrome pixel art visuals with minimal-to-nonexistent animation, joined by some basic retro-style sound effects. These are joined by a soundtrack that eschews the bleeps and bloops of the sort of technology being represented here in favor of more modern synthesized music which, while perhaps not as fitting, is almost certainly more tolerable to listen to than whatever primitive chiptune sounds would befit the visual presentation.

While still a Puzzle-Platformer, it might be more fitting to call this a “platfaller”, as the only thing jumping does here is let you hop straight up to snatch floating coins. As I noted before, this isn’t about the Platforming, but the puzzles, and The Fall of Elena Temple has a clever hook – each of the game’s self-contained single-screen levels requires you to carefully plan out your route to collect all of the coins on-screen. You’ll have the ability to rewind back a specified number of times to previous platforms you’ve jumped from once you grab a crystal within the level, and going past that number of drops means you can’t go back as far anymore. In other words, this game’s puzzles are all about pathing and order of operations.

The game’s 20 rooms offer a fair amount of variety as the game introduces new mechanics, such as teleporters, locked doors and keys, and snakes that can be killed by falling on them. Only 20 rooms seems a bit slim, but the puzzles contained within that those 20 rooms will take at least a bit of time to think through, and certainly enough to justify this game’s low $3 price tag.

When it comes to complaints, my main ones here are just that I wish there were more. More visualizations and display options, more levels… heck, an ability to create and share levels would have been outstanding here. However, for only $3, I think it’s easy to forgive the lack of such things.

It’s rare that a sequel improves on the previous game by giving players less control, worse visuals, and more limited game design, but that’s exactly what The Fall of Elena Temple manages here. By reducing the gameplay down to what worked in the previous game and discarding what didn’t, the result is a simple but cleverly-constructed Puzzle game with a retro charm. And while its simple visuals and gameplay may not appeal to everyone, fans of Puzzle games with a few bucks to spend definitely shouldn’t overlook this one.

tl;dr – The Fall of Elena Temple is a Puzzle-Platformer about the titular tomb-robbing Indiana Jones-style adventurer, and a sequel that simplifies both the visuals and gameplay of the previous game, reducing the gameplay down to the parts that worked best while getting rid of the excess. The result is a game that may not look like much, but is cleverly crafted in a way that Puzzle game fans should absolutely give a try, especially with the game’s low $3 price tag.

Grade: B

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