Triple Step has an interesting idea at its heart - combining minesweeper and a treasure chest minigame known from Zelda to create a unique puzzler experience.

Now the problem is first of all how to combine these two, and what puzzler experience you want to create with because the two are very, very different.
It feels like it took the worst of both, and is an exercise in luck and frustration, rather than having a chance of skillfully analyzing and going through the game.


An honorable mention goes to toggling running on and off! YAY!

When I hear Legend of Zelda Treasure Chest minigames, two come to mind.
One where you have a row of treasure chests each and and need to pick one - either a key to procceed to a higher tier, or rupees. You can go through it all with luck, or see their contents before opening them with a special item (at least in OoT) later in the game.

And another (in Majora's Mask), where you need to get to a treasure chest in time through an semi-invisible maze. Which seems to be where the inspiration is from.
This maze system is used every now and then in dungeon crawlers as well (with minimap), where the walls only pop up once you stand in front of them, and go back down when you move back. This makes it harder to memorize the pattern and go through it.
Harder, but very much possible for the most part. Dungeoncrawler with an inbuilt minimap will have it recorded onto that one, because it is part of the overall progression, and will be needed to go through multiple times. That, and it would be impossible to remember the layout for a large room, nevermind for longer periods of time, which I will get to later as it is happening here.

So, the minigame builds on 1. luck and 2. short-term memory to get to the chest in time. Running into a wall or a dead-end will not end the game, but it will cost you time that is quickly running out and may you lose your prize and have you start over.

Minesweeper, on the other hand, is actually a completely different type of game. It builds on 1. strategy / logical thinking and 2. slow progression.
You click on tiles to open them and reveal numbers (or lack thereof), and avoid bombs scattered throughout them.
A little bit of luck is added when you start out, as your first click may already trigger a bomb, but as that happens only in the very early stages of the game, it takes but a few seconds to jump right back in. As a child I would randomly click around and be happy when I didn't trigger a bomb, but clear a huge patch immediately.
But playing properly, each step you take you receive valueable information on the location of bombs, which you can mark so you cannot click on (and thus trigger) them anymore. Each number indicates the number of bombs surrounding the field. This gives you the opportunity to analzye where those bombs have to be, and thus also allows you to clear the surrounding areas of fields which' surrounding bombs have been cleared/marked. If you make mistakes, you have to start over. Sometimes you have to take a gamble, but only sometimes.
Say, there's an edge with 1s. You can tell the only tile uncovered next to it has got to be the bomb. Next to that bomb are more 1 tiles. Which means you can clear anything around that 1 tile since the 1 bomb has been found.
You win once you cleared every single bomb-free tile.


Good ol' minesweeper.

The only feature that has been taken over is the "explode and reset" when you trigger a bomb. To reset and semi-randomly re-distribute bombs on a field you have no knowledge of.

The Actual Game

Okay, we've got the inspirations outlined, so let's see how this game came out.
..I, uhm, will just finish that minesweeper game I started first.

I think the idea to make minesweeper more fast-paced is really interesting, and everyone loves reaching treasure chests, but right now there are a lot of design decisions that bring it down.

See, the idea is that you walk around rooms full of tiles that can randomly explode to reach a treasure chest which then teleports you to new rooms. You have one room with glowing tiles which is your sort of stage selection. 5 different difficulties that teleport you into rows of the same room with different bomb layouts and density.
But traversing them you have no indication of which tile could be dangerous, nor can you actually memorize the dangerous ones because most of them (not all), are randomly distributed in the area.
So if you run into them, am revived at the entrance and start over, you can take the exact same path and run into different mines. The "challenge" is in randomly getting it right before a timer runs out.
It's like trying to chase the Mine Fu ninja.

So the complete lack of orientation is making it really difficult. I tried to memorize the mine spots, only to realize
1. the room is too big for that to work (and the tiles too samey-looking, a checkerboard pattern would do wonders!)
2. even if I do, it is of little use, because they do change

Now, a feature in the description is that on the borders of each room you have safe tiles you can walk on. Which means you can traverse half the room in complete safety, which only makes me wonder why the room was made this big only to have it reduced that way.
It is possible to directly walk to the chest if the tiles on the side of the chest do not explode. So you walk on safe tiles .. enter one "possible unsafe tile" and then open the chest. And sometimes they do not explode and you get an easy win.
But if there are bombs there, they are consistently in place to keep you from being able to just brute-force it with repeating one tactic, which is good.


I'm safe! It even goes up and beyond!

If that does not work, you randomly walk in from the sides and try to randomly get it right somehow.
There are five areas including the tutorial one, each with a couple of rooms in their own difficulty. The difficulty supposedly gets higher and higher, but the difference was so slim I barely noticed much a difference (bar the tutorial, I suspect mines are few and far inbetween there).
You get a couple of MOTIVATING messages with a voice over in chests, of being a LEGEND and similar, which I found actually fun and charming.
The menu layout and the little lightplay inside the rooms actually looks really neat. The general music gets a little dull over time, and I would appreciate a different tune for the room-insides.

On the technical side, the timer does not work once you finished a room. The first time it works, then the timer simply disappears for all following rooms. When you return to the stage selection progress and start a different one, or start anew, the timer starts up again.
Strangely, it has surprisingly long loading times for an RPG Maker game, but they are still short and not impeding on gameplay.


All in All

The game description says it gets enjoyable once you get the hang of it, but playing it I seem to have been missing the point entirely.
There is no real tactic to be employed, other than maybe making out pre-determined mine pattern layouts, which .. even if I could make those out in large sized rooms with the same tiles .. sounds neither enjoyable, nor satisfying a challenge to me.

There is no better factor than luck in play here. Luck and persistence.
The original Zelda minigame this was inspired by had a lot of these problems, but it was alleviated by the fact that it was part of a bigger game, as well as the fact that the setbacks of running into a dead-end were milder.

It was a very short minigame you did not play over and over again, usually. Even if you still ended up losing, memorizing the current layout on the fly was very fun and running into dead-ends may have cost you your chest at the end, but did not hinder your overall progression as you just pressed on elsewhere.
The fact it was part of a bigger game also means that you have an "actual" reward waiting for you that affects you in-game (like a piece of heart or rupees), so it has incentive beyond the mini-game enjoyment itself. And even if you did not enjoy the game, you can see it as a distraction and change of pace, or just a way to flesh out the environment (it was a town preparing for a festival, after all).

Triple Step faces some of the same problems in design - luck being a huge factor, and needing to redo it a number of times before getting anywhere. It lacks the ability to smoothly continue where you left off and memorize the layout on the fly, however, due to needing to reset and revive and it offers no reward beyond the minigame experience.
It also has none of the joys a game like minesweeper offers, as there is no way at all to anticipate, plan or analyze the current room. The time limit is mild and only feels like an obsolete added factor of needing to just run through it without thinking, because that seems to be the most effective way.
Even the difficulty levels are literally called "Frustration" levels.

If the floor had a checkerboard pattern to have a better grasp on exact positioning, was a little bit smaller, and had set bombs, it could become a game based on quick memorization of your paths. The time limit would mean that you need to nail that mental image down quickly, and that you can't just start drawing a map, either. Which could be quite a bit of fun for a little while, actually!

If your floors had indications like minesweeper had, you could be able to analyze your path on the go, side-stepping potentially dangerous tiles, but you were still pressed to not dwell on it for too long because time would run out. I imagine it would be quite difficult to implement this properly as you'd also need to uncover more than the tile you step on at times (if it connects to a group of safe tiles)

I think the safe tiles are more a little bit of a helper for the fact that the room is too big to traverse from the starting point directly. It does, however, also allow for many more starting points. Which with the current model sadly does not add too much.
I wonder if it would be wise to keep them in such updated forms, since there is enough space for all kinds of paths.

I do think it is a build that can be expanded on and made into a fun little game.
As it is, I sadly cannot recommend it. It is an exercise in patience and frustration in an "okay" visual and sound package, and offers little reward for it.