Everyone's talking about how opportune and fateful the Aeon Genesis fanslation of Cave Story was, but in retrospect I feel like La Mulana's fanslation (by the same team) was a bit more groundbreaking, in terms of injecting new and unfamiliar game design ideas into the West.
I always liked how the La Mulana games had a revolver, in a final nod to Indiana Jones, but made it an exceedingly expensive, cumbersome and impactful weapon… I felt like it emphasised the gun as a bringer of death that didn't belong alongside the others.
The latter category is the true meat of La Mulana: basically every memorably difficult puzzle involves an obscured or invisible cause-and-effect. The game teaches you to scrutinise everything, to consider that any inert object in any room could be revealed as manipulable somehow.
La Mulana puzzles to me fall in two overlapping categories: code puzzles (gather the code, then input it) and cause-and-effect puzzles, where the puzzle is realising, or being told, a relationship between disconnected objects, or an edge case in how an object can be manipulated.
……OK, look, let's extract the elephant from the room here: I think everyone saying Void Stranger is "like La Mulana" is doing it a significant disservice, even though it has plenty of obvious references. Its puzzle design is significantly different and more "regular" than that.
🌚Playing Tokimeki Memorial to fully enjoy a well-written, well-designed classic sim
🌓Playing Tokimeki Memorial to fully enjoy the Taisen Puzzle-Dama spinoff of it
🌞Playing Tokimeki Memorial to fully enjoy the secret Easter egg version of it in La Mulana 1
The boss fights are reminding me a lot of the original "MSX" La Mulana… mainly because of how step-by-step the animations are, and, in contrast, how elaborate the sprites are.