For sites like these, Sundays are typically a more relaxing and casual time, where the readers catch up on what the week's demands may have made one miss. This is a special Sunday Review where the topic was restricted to flash games, as an exploration of the "flash era" of relatively low-effort free games getting tons of plays. I believe this era goes beyond the technology of flash, but the fact that flash has been killed is certainly the final nail in its coffin. This Sunday, we mourn rather than relax. Any regular readers are strictly required to check all of these out. For obvious reasons, I won't be providing the usual links, although I may add them later, as the creators of these games have by and large promised to preserve them (my recommendation for now: use Flashpoint!) In order to confirm that you have checked these out, please email us at holisticreview@protonmail.com.

jmtb02 is responsible for a lot of great flash games, but one of the greatest, I think, is Treadmillasaurus Rex. The concept is as simple as it is flashy: you are a dinosaur on a treadmill. Spikes are also on the treadmill, and lasers on the edges. The game has perfectly tuned the position and/or speed of all of these elements to keep you in the same repetitive motion, but if it did this forever it'd be boring. That's why, sometimes, a wheel spins in the background, affecting the position and/or speed of some game element at random. This leads to an inconsistent difficulty: sometimes your rolls can be really good, and other times they can be really bad, but it also leads to continuous excitment. That's what I think makes this game emblematic of the flash era: it uses a concept that might have been scrapped or significantly altered if the game had had another week of development time, but still manages to create excitement unlike what you can get in more polished games.

Though now most will know it as an obscure mobile studio, in its heyday Nitrome was producing quality browser games an astonishing rate. The studio specialised in building complete games around an exceedingly simple core mechanic and in this regard I consider Ditto to be one of their crowning achievements. The central gimmick for this puzzle-platformer involves the player character and their sentient reflection, navigating two levels at once through a magic mirror- the controls are tight and responsive, the level design is solid, and the puzzles are challenging but never frustrating. Like most Flash games there is little plot but plenty of atmosphere. What sets it apart is that, unlike most other Nitrome games, there is no upbeat music: levels are scored entirely by footsteps and childlike grunts of exertion from the protagonist. This is one of the few Flash games that has ever scared me - the sense of loneliness is palpable.

Chronotron is a game about time travel. In it, you must solve small puzzles to collect the missing pieces of your time machine and return it to normal. To help you in this, you can go into your time machine to go back in time to the beginning of the level, where the past versions of yourself will keep running around just like you did before and interacting with the objects you did. I personally have a lot of great memories playing this game back when I was a kid, as I've always found the topic of time travel really interesting, and this game's core gimmick makes great use of it in its gameplay.

The Mold Fairy is a short, entirely cursor-controlled flash game by Gregory Weir, putting the player in control of a mold-spreading fairy. The gameplay is incredibly simple, but the tone of the game is strange, somewhere between a storybook for children and a grimdark parody of a storybook for children. Every line of text, save for the interface, is written in rhyme, and though it only has three tracks, all of them fit well with the atmosphere of the experience. It has its rough edges -- its visuals are generally unrefined, for instance, and there isn’t a whole lot to it, but it’s worth playing just for the vibe.

All in all, The Mold Fairy is short and sweet. Takes only about 3 to 7 minutes to finish, tops, depending on whether you want to 100% it. Pretty good. Play it if you want.