No One Can Stop Mr. Domino (1998, PlayStation)

Developer: Artdink
Publisher: Acclaim Entertainment
Clear Version: PS1
Clear Platform: PS1
Clear Date: 3/17/25

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Why should I care?
It’s not great, but there simply isn’t another game like this.

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Do not stop Domino-kun

This now probably by far holds the record for longest stretch between acquisition and reaching credits for me — certainly since I started this blog. I don’t recall exactly when I got this game as a child, but it may well have been a 20th-century acquisition. I recall being drawn in by the cute little guy on its box art and the unique concept described on its back cover. It’s a flawed, often annoying game, but to this day it remains a singular game, and I’m glad it exists.

And as an aside, I really miss that browsing experience. Although I still buy most of my games as physical discs (when available), the retail experience of doing so is much hollower. The floorspace devoted to physical games has diminished dramatically in big box stores, and GameStop is of course circling the drain. Publishers know this, and their boxes reflect it. The back — a space previously used to try to sell a game to someone rifling through a physical store’s inventory — is generally low-effort and as full of legalese as it is any description of the actual game. This is a reaction to consumer trends, of course, as more people move to digital purchases, but I also think it begets it. A shame.

But back to the game, Mr. Domino sure is a strange one. It doesn’t fit neatly into any genre except “puzzle,” I guess. You play as an anthropomorphic domino, and in each stage, you run laps around a themed environment (like a casino or a family’s home, etc.). As you go, you can press any button to drop (inanimate) dominoes behind you. The lanes you run in are gridded. Most cells contain nothing, but some contain boost pads or health pads, things of that nature. Most importantly, some contain buttons that cause events to occur in the environment. These events then cause an impact on another marked cell in the environment. Triggering all events is all that’s necessary to complete each stage, but you can probably piece together what will give you the best score: triggering the events in sequence with one big domino chain.

Doing so is no easy task, though. You have to be sharp to place dominoes everywhere they need to go on your first pass through a stage, and there are hazards throughout that will break your chain if you’re not careful. What’s more, you can’t take all the laps you want; Mr. Domino’s health slowly decreases with every passing second, and eventually he will revert into a regular domino. You can step on health pads to restore it fully, but these are finite. You can also step on reset pads to fully reinitialize the state of the level, but accidentally stepping on one of these when you’ve already set up a pretty good chain is utterly vexing.

The time limit isn’t particularly forgiving either, making this all a pretty challenging and rather frustrating proposition. It is quite satisfying to clear a level in a single chain, but you’re likely to fail quite a few times before you can manage that. Additionally, the game has finite continues, presumably to pad out its meager six-stage length. Fortunately, this can be circumvented by savescumming, but it would’ve been nice for the continues to have been infinite in the first place.

So, I mean, the game is generally more annoying than it is fun, but at least it’s unique. Its soundtrack is fairly pedestrian, and its graphics are just fine, but whatever. This is no masterpiece, but I’m still glad it caught my eye all those years ago, and I’m glad I’ve finally put a stop to Mr. Domino.