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.

Reviewed on Mar 18, 2024


Comments