BRAIN DRAIN

Brain Drain is not a falling tile game as much as it is a spinning tile game. Brain Drain’s gameplay is dead simple: press A to rotate a two by two area of tiles clockwise, press B to rotate it counter clockwise. At the start of each stage you see the combination you need to achieve, with that same combo being mirrored in the top left corner. The brain then scrambles the pieces and you have to spin them back into place. This is a puzzle game that’s more puzzle than it is game, you could play this physically quite easily, in face we’re certain there is a physical version of this exact game.

If you beat a stage fast enough you get an extra time bonus, beating bonus stages where you reorganize a picture wins you a lightning bolt. You have to hold down the A button to use a time bonus, and the B button to use a lightning flash, things the game tells you in the vaguest language possible. On medium and high difficulties (which are called Student and Genius in the game manual) there are random effects that hamper your game, like erratic cursor movement or blocks being turned into question marks. There’s also Brain Race where you try and beat the clock.

We run into a problem, now, which is that this game is quite good fun but we suck at puzzles like this. We’re good until about level 40, but when the game starts throwing more complex patterns at us we can feel our brain leaking out the sides of our head. Thankfully the harder difficulties start you at later levels, so you can grind out those sorts of puzzles and try and grow your prefrontal lobe or what have you. We will practice, and in the next 94 game we will become the largest brained individual in the world. We’d have to be for having five headmates!

Brain Drain isn’t a very mechanically deep puzzle game, the patterns you have to memorize don’t trigger the same part of the brain as T-spin set-ups and great tanaka rensa’s. Everything you need to win a puzzle is on the screen, you just have to put it together. There’s no improvisation, there is only logical thinking. And once the later stages come up, there’s not enough time to sit and think it through. You need to build up to those difficulties.