Marble Cooking is one of the most unique and fun action-oriented puzzle games I?ve ever come across, Hentai (i.e.?adult? in Japanese) elements notwithstanding. You play a little witch who must hunt down a demon lord she has summoned, and who has disobeyed her and is now roaming the world, wrecking havoc in his path. To do so, you will need to vanquish his minions, which are various animated objects, from spellbooks, brooms, and others. There are dozens of levels (called ?stages? in the game), and you progress from one to the next by wiping out all the minions in each stage.

The fun of Marble Cooking lies in a very novel gameplay. Your character appears in a grid similar to a chessboard, and you can only move vertically or horizontally on floor tiles. The enemies you must destroy float around the board, each following a fixed patrol pattern that you must discover. If you run into one of these baddies, you die. To destroy them, you must first press ?Z? button to put a pentagram on the tile you?re standing on. You can then move away from the pentagram, laying carrots (this is done automatically) on every tile you step on. Press ?Z? again to stop laying carrots. Then, pressing ?Z? once again calls forth your sidekick, a magical rabbit, from the pentagram. The rabbit will follow the carrot trail you lay out earlier, killing any enemy he runs into along the way. The trick, then, is to lay the carrots and time it so that your rabbit will kill all the enemies in one go. This is much harder than it sounds, especially since the rabbit will disappear (along with the carrots) once he runs to the end of the carrot trail. Fortunately, the game is quite forgiving, as there is no time limit, you can lay carrots for as many times as you want, and the enemies never diverge from their pattern.

At higher stages, the game becomes much more challenging, since the enemies? patterns are much harder to figure out and memorize, and there are many more of them. The combination of skill and reflexes in Marble Cooking is very well thought out, and the anime graphics are sharp and smooth. Unfortunately, there are several quite disgusting Hentai scenes that appear as cut-scenes, so anyone who is offended should turn Story Mode option off. Other than this minor nuisance that is entirely unnecessary (the game is great anyway without the Hentai trimmings), Marble Cooking is a wonderful and unique puzzle game that is highly recommended. Thumbs up!