Aesthetically this game is cool, but most of the gameplay is just a frustrating, unrewarding, squirrel-foraging-for-nuts simulator that left me wishing after every death for something to break up the monotonous gameplay loop of eat / sleep / die to something unavoidable. At no point did the squirrel rat slug cat thing feel fun to control as far as platforming was concerned, and with minimal story and no real upgrades or changes to the gameplay formula throughout the areas I got to, my initial curiosity to explore the world quickly turned into apathy.

This is in the same vein as Pseudoregelia for me, it was good for what it is, but nothing to go insane about. The item abilites were cool, I love using the bubble wand to break some moments. The game was perfectly balanced around what you can do. I will say there was stuff that annoyed me. The Ghost Dog was really annoying to deal with, the spikes would sometimes blend in well with the background that it would be hard to tell what's there and what wasn't, and for waht it is, the $25 asking price is a bit too much. Still fun, but nothing to freak out over or to get right away.

A perfectly pleasant little cozy game.

Root Letter, its predecessor game, is pretty bad. The main character is bizarrely cruel, and the answers to the mysteries vary wildly depending on player actions. Its just a mean, inconsistent game.

By comparison, Root Film is just kind of a cozy time. The mysteries aren't particularly complex and the mechanics are equally simple. Your main task is just hopping from place to place, trying to activate dialogue. The confrontation sections are really simple with the evidence you have and there's not a lot of concern to be had over failing. Its just simple little mystery time.

The core film gimmick is also kind of delightful. The two alternating leads, Yagumo and Riho, fill different roles of the film industry. Yagumo is an aspiring director trying to catch his big break. Riho is a model who's traveling as part of a media personality gig she's hoping to nab. You would think that mean they'd encounter the same kinds of characters, but not really. Riho's public visibility and charm gets her invited into fancy parties or happily welcomed into private succession conflicts. She can mingle among the rich, even when she's just scrounging for jobs. Her mysteries all focus on her easing her way into these superficially pleasant social spheres and poking holes into the facades.

By comparison, Yagumo's down-on-his-luck status in life forces him into an underdog position. I kind of wish the game leaned into Yagumo as a dipshit more, even if it was a quality I hated in the Root Letter protagonist. Riho solves mysteries out of the goodness of her heart. Yagumo, for much of the game, seems to be solving mysteries because these murders are getting in the way of his location scouting. He really, REALLY needs this job, so he'll dig through the dirtiest corners to solve a crime and get back on the path of getting paid. Even if I preferred Riho's cases to Yagumo's, its a fun distinction.

The final case is sort of a shrug for me. The game pulls out its Twists to reveal how Riho's story and Yagumo's story connects, but it doesn't fit together for me. It means a lot of pretty grim endings for Riho's charming cast, endings that don't line up with the characterizations that I thought were established.

But its hard to complain too much. I didn't go in expecting a masterpiece, just a distraction for my lunch breaks. It filled that purpose with a solid Good Enough.

I think this game looks great on the system, with the 1 bit art-style really lending itself the Samurai aesthetic the game is going for, but I ended up a little bored by the game. The concept is sound - Zipper is a semi-rogue lite in that enemy placement stays the same when restarting a run you've died on, but changes it if you quit out and restart.

In practice, it wasn't so interesting. That was mainly the lack of any real push to get what I needed to go where I needed to get to. There are no upgrades, the map is always the same layout and though positions in a 'room' will change, the makeup of enemies doesn't. It could have been a decent high score/time attack game but the random placement of a mandatory key each round makes that aspect far more luck based and thus tedious for repeat playthroughs.

Crank-watch: On the surface the crank seems to have no functionality in this game but it actually serves as a preview for on screen enemy movement when you have highlighted a target square for yourself - it's a bit of a shame that the game doesn't mention this, leaving an almost vital mechanic completely missable.