MKTE

MKTE is a borrowed acronym for Máte kouzelné tvarůžky elixír — that's how this game tries to function, looking like someone abandoned it halfway through development. Game Boy Advance got it in 2003, when solid titles were already running on four wheels. This one is something different.

It's a puzzle with adventure elements where you manipulate colored blocks and collect pieces of some mysterious quadrilateral. It would be likeable if there was any concrete logic to it. Instead, you move around a map, bump into things, and the game occasionally shows you something. Like the design was thought up on a Friday around five in the evening and nobody wanted to look at it again.

Controls are intuitive — classic four directions on the D-pad, buttons for actions. Playability keeps its secrets close. Unclear what happens when you break a certain block in a certain order. Unclear why something moves sometimes and doesn't other times. That's not mystery, that's poorly written code you're witnessing. Graphics are monochrome and flat, sounds remind you of the initial stages of assembling a synthesizer.

But MKTE has something — a strange charm. Like when you blow into a cartridge and something plays even though it shouldn't. It's a notebook of a weird dream, not a acclaimed game, but an interesting glitch that publishers back then could afford on hardware where mid-tier functional titles had already become the norm.

Today you play it in an emulator for purely anthropological reasons. You want to see what happens when ambition and budget collide without a referee. You won't be entertained for three minutes, but curiosity lasts longer.