Let’s get the worst out of the way first. I can’t stand the character writing and performances in this game. I find a number of characters entirely off putting, some to the point where I would yell at my TV almost every time they spoke their condescension. It’s a small miracle I was able to push myself to play through the entire game.

While there’s a chance that some people may like the writing here, subjectivity and all, some problems relating to this are objectively bad. One example towards the end of the game has you being asked to copy a series of verbal instructions, and if you take more than a literal second to comply, the instruction will be impatiently repeated.

It’s not all bad though. The broad strokes of the story are interesting, and there is the occasional scene that is poignantly portrayed (most often without any dialogue).

The art is the main draw here anyway. Its claymation art style leads to some stunning scenes, but again I would put a caveat on this. Because you’re looking at recreations of physical objects, not the direct photos of the models themselves, something is lost in the physicality you’d normally get from this style. It kind of just looks like any other stylised video game.

Now I don’t think that’s a reason not to explore new creation methods for game assets, but when this game took 10+ years to develop, I’m just honestly not sure this was worth that time investment. I especially think this as you feel the game’s pace being padded out with a lot of slow backtracking.

I hate to sound so critical of something that’s clearly had so much care put into it, especially into the handmade art, but so much just didn’t connect with me. I’d recommend checking it out on Game Pass if you have it available so that you can see if you fare any better than I did with the writing.

This takes elements from Picross and simplifies them in most cases. Other than on the shikaku puzzles you can usually breeze through the puzzles without a whole lot of thought, but honestly I’m kind of fine with that. This is just a good chill out, play while listening to a podcast, or while you have a free five minutes sort of game. It’s also perfect to play on a phone with one hand, so it’s ticking all the boxes I’m looking for in a phone game these days.

The shikaku puzzles go in the other direction, unfortunately, where they do require some real thought, but as far as I’ve been able to discern, there’s no real strategies to solving them (like you’d have in Picross), making it a long series of trial and error actions. I lost interest in these pretty quickly, especially as they don’t have any art once they’re complete either. I think the design of the regular puzzles’ art is delightful, so that’s another point for them.

A really fun Metroidvania, with really responsive movement and a good combat system. There's some nice art too, especially in things like the UI and combat effects. The environments also look good, though they're maybe not the most unique or memorable.

The story was easily the weakest point for me, with the main story seeming interesting at first before just becoming set dressing. The collectables that had lore attached to them, which I was compelled to read all of because of the type of game player that I am, had writing that I found rather impenetrable. I would often read a paragraph and immediately be unable to recall what it was about. I wish this had better, and usually sparser, writing, as the setting here was intriguing.