Jishogi

TLDR; Fantastic game, 10/10, but the game gets too dark in certain instances Story: Ill try not to spoil anything. This game is a masterpiece from a story and character perspective. Genuinely one of the best visual novels I've played in that regard. The characters were very realistic and unique, and the story is very captivating with an interesting world. This game took unoriginal ideas, and created a very original creative experience. The dialogue choices you make actually impact many cutscenes, and change certain endings to a slight extent. A good maybe 1/4 of my playtime was just trying out various combinations and choices to see what other characters said, and which endings were affected. Art: Fantastic, for its medium. I don't think anyone should expect masterpiece art from a game of this scale, especially from a solo-ish Dev. There were no instances of art being a distraction, and instead enhanced scenes and emotions. All of the unique animations and expressions the characters use have much more quality than average Visual Novels. Music: Except for one track during the final puzzles, i genuinely thought each score was amazing. Music and sound design tends to either make immersion great or annoy the players off the game, and this is certainly the former. Major props for for the sound design for certain cutscenes and character dialogues. The background music was phenomenal for the puzzles too. Lore: This game intentionally starts you off with no information, so that you can glean what is necessary yourself and investigate what you want to know. There is a ton of lore, but none of it is necessary for game completion. I feel like it was the most respectful decision for player engagement; however, it really did feel like most of the lore was to foreshadow or pre-fill in potential plot holes. If that was the case, I think a better decision would be to have them become accessible during relevant paths to certain endings, instead of a dump halfway into the game where you might forget most of it/get spoiled to future events. Puzzles: The puzzles were very unique and interesting. The game does a good job of starting off easy, and getting progressively more difficult. I took the time and genuinely solved each one, but the Dev included a "fair" skip, and a skip just for people who wish to not play the puzzles. The puzzles took maybe 1/2 my play time. In my opinion, there were too many puzzles for the "harder" trials. Sometimes, it would take over an hour, just to experience maybe 5 minutes of story, just to go back to another hour of puzzles. While it was frustrating at times, the puzzles themselves never felt unfair or impossible, just that some felt more akin to finding safe combinations than solving puzzles (looking at you, rotators) Reception: While this game deserves much more spotlight for its quality than what it got, i can see why the game itself didn't get too popular. I only saw it myself from ManlyBadassHero's lets play. Story-orientated games with little "gameplay" is already a niche fandom, and the difficult puzzles later on most likely turned away most "casual" players who wanted to experience the story. This game also featured extremely dark themes, and even though they were non explicit, they were much more dark than most people would want to experience. This middle ground shuns the crowd that wants explicit content, while also turning away players that don't want the dark themes. The experience that was created was very unique, but the people it will appeal to is incredibly niche. My main reason for playing was to experience the other endings not shown in the lets play, and I stuck to it because of the story I already saw. Normally, I would have scrolled past this game because of the content warnings, and would have dropped it if I wasn't willing to play through the puzzles. Overall: This was one of the best visual novel games I've ever experienced, especially for its price. The puzzles were a bit tiresome in certain instances, but they overall don't detract from the experience too much. This was a fantastic game; however, I probably wont recommend it to friends because the game itself gets too dark in some instances. On the flip side, in alot of other games you can tell where the Devs cut corners, or cop out to gimmicks or common story beats. Not only is that not present here, but you can see many spaces where the Dev polished certain scenes and aspects to a shine. That level of care is somewhat rare, unfortunately. I will look forward to future games from this Dev, but hope they will be less dark

One of the best games I have ever played, incredible story, music, and art. Full of passion and will get you hooked, worth every cent. Please play this game if you get the ability to, this game needs all the visibility it can get, it's amazing.

Game was really cool! I've never seen puzzles like that and a narrative to go along with it so that you actually want to get through those puzzles to see what happens. On my first play through I got the BEST ending cause I'm not a psychopath. I beat it on hard, but I think I can take on 9th dan, we'll see.

good puzzle game with a twist you can see coming a mile away as soon the first flashback starts, if the store images haven't clued you in already. the story was still pretty decent, but that "dark" tag on the steam store page needs to be several hundred miles away from this game. even the worst ending is strangely upbeat, especially in the spoiler genre this game belongs to. (i may or may not be desensitized) i especially like that there are multiple solutions to the later more difficult puzzles, and that literally chucking random pieces in random directions and figuring out where to go from there is just a valid solution as taking a methodical approach. experimentation is encouraged, which is great overall, but this IS to the game's detriment for some of the later puzzles if i'm totally being honest, especially the extremely nasty one near the end of the game. It also doesn't help that a proper explanation for what the pieces do is buried in the Knowledge section of the pause menu, shoved within multiple pages of info and lore dump. Highly recommend you buy at its extremely generous price for the playtime (5 dollars for 7+ hours of content, even longer on harder difficulties). Indie game pricing has gotten completely out of hand these days, and I'm glad to see that indie games that don't charge 20 dollars for 3 or less hours of content total still exist.

This game and SIGNALIS gave me gender envy. I don't know what that implies about me.

Good puzzle game vn with interesting premise, usually games like this only focus on puzzles or story but with this one you get both, legitimately head scratching puzzles and an interesting story with quite a few endings it could use some polish here and there but it's impressive for a game made by basically one dude

It's an enjoyable and unique puzzle game. It's got a good story with interesting worldbuilding. I found it worthy of 100% completing. I found most of the endings satisfying and appropriately spicy. (You are in full control of how toxic this yuri gets, and consequences play out quite nicely) The only complaint I might have is that the difficulty of the puzzles are a little inconsistently paced in the 2nd half, but perhaps that's the price of freedom. The music is also a little bit repetitive, and I felt like I wanted to lower the volume sometimes but I think that's probably just my taste. But I forgive a lot of these flaws because I think the game was made with a lot of heart.

fun puzzle game with an endearing story. kinda awkward pacing, and the highest difficulty can be a bit grueling at times. but overall very good.

This is an enjoyable game that is certainly somewhat rough around the edges. Pacing is probably one of its main flaws, with the game taking some time to pick up, both from a story standpoint as well as gameplay-wise. It’s also at the end where you get to start working toward a specific ending. So I’d say from a story point of view the start of the second act is when it starts to pick up and from a gameplay point of view it’s more so after the end of the second act where you’re basically at the end since that’s where the endings are decided. For the puzzles, however, I personally found the pacing fine, with the game also warning you if a puzzle might be a bit too much at your current point in time. Enjoyment of the story, most likely the main appeal of the game, will depend on how much you can buy the characters. Both the protagonist and the antagonist are flawed individuals who lend themselves to a morally grey narrative. The narrative is also built in such a way where it trusts the reader to piece out the characters’ motivations and come up with their own conclusions. I’m a bit split on the lore entries the player can get. On one hand, they help flesh out the universe of the game more and reward the player with a better understanding of the situation. On the other, some of this info could be more integrated in the memories and overall story. Three difficulties are offered for the puzzles. I personally haven't got to try out the middle difficulty, but easy allows to progress through puzzles fairly quickly, allowing the player to focus more on the story while 9th dan offers challenging puzzles, especially in the later half of the game, at the risk of feeling tedious at times, especially with the amount of puzzles the player has to go through to gain access to a room. The player is, however, not locked out of any difficulty, so it's always possible to change the difficulty later on. At the time of writing this review, I personally was not able to select the middle difficulty when starting a new game. While this was fine by me, this does mean that, if necessary, it is possible to select it later on when changing the difficulty in the in-game menu. The OST does its job well for the most part, with the tracks fitting the vibes nicely, though I have found it sometimes a bit repetitive, especially when spending a bit too much time in some of the puzzle rooms or in some of the memory rooms. Generally though there is more than enough diversity in the tracks to avoid this. Some slight bugs and typos can be found at times, but nothing that should significantly hinder enjoyment of the game. Overall a pretty interesting game with a more compelling story than what one might expect at first and some unique puzzles.

This game really is a little gem. The story is very well written and I also really enjoy the puzzles. The characters seem alive and their motivations believable. You can see the developer's love for his games. There are numerous endings, and even here the endings differ in small details. Depending on what you've done before. The music is an excellent accompaniment to the story. It gets louder and quieter depending on the mood of the narrator. There are hints in the dialogues that you only really recognize the second time through. These little details are what make the game so good. All in all, a masterpiece! A little introduction for anyone who wants to try it out on the PC: Run with arrow keys, otherwise you need c, x, and z. Use CTRL to run. All puzzles can be skipped with Backspace (if you are too curious about the next part of the story, as I was at the very end of my first playthrough)