Dr. Kobushi's Labyrinthine Laboratory

Pretty good little Chip's Challenge-style puzzle game by, oddly enough, a handful of folks at a small Parisian security research firm. I randomly stumbled upon this on sale a year ago and promptly forgot about it. That is, until the power went out and I needed something to play that was already loaded on my Steamdeck and didn't require an internet connection. After our power returned, I slowly made my way through it as time allowed. What you get is roughly 100 levels with a good ramp-up in difficulty and mechanics, a minimal story very blatantly in service of the puzzling (to the point they break the fourth wall on this repeatedly), and a small cast of fun characters that I genuinely liked. There's also some small Easter eggs in the dialog and musical score that I liked; for example, one of the tracks has sound samples reminiscent of Kirby that were a decent bop to puzzle to. I did have some minor red-green colorblindness issues on some of the later floor tilesets, but the undo features and fast restarts made this forgiving whenever it came up. The game isn't exactly going to surprise you: it's comfort food for puzzle nerds. But that's good enough for me, and might be good enough for you.

I found this game randomly from the Steam discovery queue. Seeing "hard" and "puzzle" dilated my pupils and so of course I purchased instantly... This is a "super-indie" game, as it is not merely independently developed but also independently conceived - virtually all conventions and expectations from similar games can be discarded here. And you know what? It's a boatload of fun. The music is absolutely bumping. The characters are genuine media - straight from the developer's heart to the screen. The puzzles are wild in their design, sometimes a barrage of nonsense to parse, sometimes an impossible situation until you spot the trick, sometimes a pure gauntlet of patience and awareness. The game is dreamlike to play - like it fell out of an alternate timeline where video game artistry in the 1990's was taken much more seriously. It feels like something that should not exist - can not exist. The game is actually pretty easy relative to the marketing, but you need to be able to solve the levels to progress - if you get stuck, some tenacity is expected. For Nadim, because I know you're reading this, give us that level editor and I'll see if I can devise something REAL nasty. There are a few strange design decisions (slow walk/push speed, visibility of some symbols, force restart on death) that may occasionally frustrate and must be looked over. So yeah, pretty good recommendation from Steam there! If you've found your way to this page, you should probably buy it too. It's on Nintendo Switch as well. 8.5/10

I get that some developers want to make games that look like the old classics but to be honest the game looks like crap. I am not the person who rants about how the puzzler looks BTW. There are no PC options, you can press F 10 to quit and that's all your options, you can't skip the boring monologues....nothing! zero options. I played similar games on mobile phone that look cleaner and play better than this game. No basic accessibility option of course but I have to mention this. The worst thing is that the puzzles are well designed but the other elements are not or they are completely missing. Could've been a good game. Sadly i can't recommend this game.

Came for the music (thanks Fearofdark) and stayed for the puzzles, the game is challenging but not impossible, hard but not unfair, characters are mysterious but charming, the plot is null but unimportant. Didn't had the time (or courage) to finish it yet but I think it's pretty solid, maybe some improvements in my mind : - A way to keep track in wich level I've forgot to take a bonus (I'll need to reach 100% one day, i hope, without having to do check the 100 stages again just for one forgotten bonus). - A reminder of the behaviour of opponents in the stage (like when you first encounter them, maybe when you hit pause or with an encyclopedia in main menu) because i'm still not sure how the red and brown ennemies behave. The game is charming and I really hope it will meet his public, it's also interresting to see what Go programming language can do ! Vive les jeux français, je retourne y jouer !

If you want a puzzle game that really excercises your mind, then Dr.Kobushi's is for you. It really makes you think outside the box with it's turn based grid puzzles.

Came for fearofdark, stayed for the puzzles and characters.

A charming game with a lot of care. Played for the music, stayed for the creative ideas.