Non-Scrolling Flick-Screen Action Adventures

Whether it's a Zelda 1 style top-down adventure or a platformer like La-Mulana, there is a special kind of magic to a game that has a large world but no scrolling screens.

You are free to move around and observe the surroundings without the visible area constantly changing based on your movements.

You can go and check out what the left side of the screen has while being able to observe the right side at the same time. That's not possible if the screen is scrolling!

Once you enter a new screen, you can observe where the exits to the surrounding screens are. You can move around in that condensed space while making observations of enemy locations, treasures, doors and other places of interest without ANY of them disappearing from the screen or new things appearing.

This gives the player a special sense of exploration and investigation. It's almost as if each screen is a level of its own!

In a scrolling screen the attention is constantly changing when new things appear and previous things disappear. Scrolling worlds also tend to have larger areas where you just run forward with not much other actions to do or other actions to plan. Navigating around the full world, and backtracking, becomes more confusing too.

How exciting it is in your basic sidescroller to finally reach the end of a scrolling area, and wonder what might be behind the edge of the screen or behind the door! It feels almost as if your brain finally resets from all the new information you had to take in and old information you had to throw away while the screen constantly scrolled!

With non-scrolling or so-called "flick-screen" games every single area is like that! It's a clear condensed dump of information that you can freely explore and wonder!

Even in the first Super Mario Bros. game the non-scrolling bonus areas had a special sense of interest because you were able to examine, explore and act in a special space designed to be moved around in and observed in a very special manner.

Often the greatest inventions come from a lot of restrictions. A lot of the non-scrolling perfection came from computers like the MSX that were terrible at making the screen scroll. But because of that they had to design the games differently and we ended up having a special type of gameplay that a scrolling screen can never achieve.

This group is for all who have found the wonder and joy in this very special and niche style of gameplay!