Maple Blade

PC A mistake I think I can be prone to is allowing perfection to be the enemy of good. Certainly not in my own actions, but in the games I’ll select for coverage on this site. Which feels like a very unfairly pre-damning way to begin my review of the extremely lovely and highly commendable Maple Blade. This short, adorable turn-based action game has you playing as the Purifier, a young girl charged with walking through the spooky woods of the Sage Grounds, a grid-shaped top-down randomized area filled with trees, gravestones, coins, shrines and ghosties. Your initial goal is to rescue a missing cat and return her to the Visitor’s Center for the Sage Grounds (quite a pleasant and safe place during the day, it seems), after which you get given a whole list of objectives to complete across as many nights as it takes. In Maple Blade, the ghosts only move when you do, and the tile-based movement and arrows showing a ghost’s intended direction means you can calculate safe routes to get…