Also known as 皆で空機読み (minna de kuuki yomi) in Japanese, this was a game I got on the Japanese eShop a few months back becuase it's like always on sale for about 250 yen. It recently came out in English, to my great surprise, and it worked in English on my American Nintendo Account. It doesn't have a "beaten" state, so far as I can tell, but my sister and I managed to get a perfect run on it, so I'm calling it beaten :b .

"Kuuki yomi", literally "reading the air", is the Japanese phrase for reading a room. The best way to describe this series is "Warioware without prompts". It's got a simple, black and white artstyle, and it puts you (or in this case, the two of you) into odd situations suddenly and you need to intuit the controls and what you should do by the nature of the situation. For example, you're on a train and two people labeled "boyfriend" and "girlfriend" are standing staring at you. The correct "read" is to move over so they can sit together.

This particular version of the game has a two-player mode where one character is red, the other is blue, and you need to work together to read the room. You do a gauntlet of a random assortment of 10 (out of 20 or so) mini-games, and it gives you a compatibility score at the end (because of course it does) X3. For example, in one game, one player is a kid in their bed, and the other is Santa. The kid needs to lay down and pretend to be asleep until Santa passes. In another one, the two of you are on an escalator and there's a girl in very skimpy clothing in front of you, and you need to avert your eyelines to not stare at her. The game is very quirky and Japanese, and it is not ashamed of it at all XD

Verdict: Highly recommended. For the price, it's a great little Warioware clone with a strong theme. It's not a ton of content, sure, but I've had tons of fun with many family and friends just trying to quickly figure out the game at hand together. It's definitely much more fun with friends, so if you have someone to play with, this is a great little party game you can pull out on your Switch.

空気を読む (kuuki wo yomu) - Phrase meaning literally "to read the atmosphere", equivalent to English's "to read the room".

In case you were wondering, that's where the name 空気読み comes from. As far as really defining the game, however, one can't easily top DeviMetric's summarizing of the game as "social anxiety Wario Ware", which perfectly encapsulates the experience. To those who have never played Wario Ware, it is a collection of microgames in which the player is thrown into a series of situations where they have control of a person or object in a scene and must figure out, in just a few seconds, what is expected of them in that situation and how to do it.

What separates Kuukiyomi from Wario Ware, and what makes it so novel, is that its microgames revolve around social situations. Say you're on a train, sitting between two empty seats, and a couple enters the car. Armed with just directional inputs and the A and B buttons, what will you do? That might be a simple one, but as the game progresses into its many levels, more unusual situations begin to appear, and those who're not quick on their feet will end up getting lots of awkward looks.

There's just over an hour of gameplay to be had with the default game mode, then there's an alternative mode where acting socially inadequately is the objective. Finally, the game features a list of secrets that are unlocked by taking unorthodox approaches to the situations at hand. I figure most of the replayability, however, comes from having other people (preferrably that have some knowledge of Japanese culture) have a go at the campaign. Kuukiyomi has become one of my favorite party games, and watching other people struggle with it has consistently gotten laughs out of the friend groups I bring it to.