Mysterium - Game Boy Roulette Episode 275 

1:50 - looks more like a jacuzzi to me; obviously the dragon is pissed off that you’ve interrupted his spa time. 😜

It's kinda messed up that as soon as you mentioned Maxis, I was like "ah yes, SimAnt". The box art to this rules! I really appreciate the ambition too, and I would've loved this as a kid, but games like this haven't aged well enough to not be completely overwhelming.

I was addicted to this game and played it exclusively for months!

This reminds me of old PC games from that era.

I remember buying/renting games just on the strength of the boxart. So many mistakes. I eventually began looking at the back, and then... Nintendo Power!!!!

I audibly laughed when I saw this was first person LMAO

Definitely a note taking game that's better with the actual manual because it will give you a lot of helpful starting info, like a grid to show how different items react with the 4 different pools of liquid. You can then use that to make educated guesses as to what other items will change into. There is a lot of depth, but sadly a lot of its useless if you know what to do. The combat is definitely dumb, but what worked against it the most is the random crashes. Pretty much need to learn to speedrun the game to get through it without freezing and to manage the limited inventory slots. Oh, the rose is actually health (not sure why), so using that would have healed you. And the screen getting dimmer was because the torch light was going out. If you found and used another torch (instead of dropping it in water), the screen would go back to "normal" for a while. Another one of those interesting mechanics that isn't great in execution.

It does look like a classic Dungeons of Daggorath type game. I could never get into first person dungeon crawls, I never had the patience for them.

Umm didnt they do sim city 2000 gba too? i have it and its a fantastic mix of classic and 2000.

I really like this title but it does require a bunch of memorization or writing down what-does-what.