Letters to Arralla

A cute game with delightfully quirky characters, though the puzzle aspect of finding out where to deliver each letter did frustrate me at times. Plus: why can't I use the pub or the hot springs? I'm a hard working turnip. Criminal.

Feels janky as hell and poorly tuned. Yhere are like 10 houses total on the island, so the central delivery mechanic isn't ever really something you feel like you're mastering, rather every clue was pretty much dead simple OR completely obscure. The ability to ask the postmaster where everything goes also kinda defeats the fun. for a game that's 100% about walking places, it's really wild how bad the movement feels. There are a few "twists" that I thought were fun (and included the coolest character, who only appears for like 2 scenes). Overall it feels like a comic at an open mic that stumbles on-stage, gets a good laugh out of their first two jokes, but by the end of their 5 minutes they're just kind of mumbling setups and payoffs completely disconnected from each other. I also really don't like a lot of the character designs, including the protagonist. It feels like they were going for incredibly cute, but to me it came off as more bland than anything else. Giving everything butts I think was supposed to be cute, but it just gave a lot of characters a kind of bulbous look. If this was a student game I'd be cautiously curious about their first full game, but as a commercial game I really didn't connect with this.