StarTropics

StarTropics is the Nintendo game that is not really a Nintendo game: it was made by the American R&D3 team, led by Genyo Takeda, and never released in Japan. Mike Jones travels to a tropical archipelago to find his missing uncle, an archaeologist, and the game mixes Zelda-style overworld exploration with grid-based dungeon combat.

The dungeons are the distinctive part: instead of free movement, you leap in grid squares, which turns every room into a small tactical puzzle where a bad jump puts you beside an enemy rather than in front of it. The overworld is explored in the same leap mechanic, and progress is gated by items and by your uncle's submarine - which itself is a puzzle game about navigating a map with limited fuel. The most famous thing about it is physical: a letter included with the retail game had to be dipped in water to reveal a code that the game asks you to type in, and the current eShop rereleases recreate the letter digitally.

• ▸Grid-based leap movement for both dungeons and overworld
• ▸Submarine sections with limited fuel and their own navigation puzzles
• ▸The famous real-world letter puzzle, still required for progression
• ▸A puzzle-heavy structure with fewer action sequences than its contemporaries