TaniNani is a mobile app that's been dumped on PC as a cash grab by morally defunct mobile devs. It's a 2D retro pixel tile placement/pathing puzzle game. The somewhat, almost original premise has you re-arrange tiles so that the little critter/blobs can find a path to walk to each other and collect crystals on the way. As with many mobile apps, there's a timer so you need to think and move fast to get a good rating for each puzzle level.
There's a slew of problems with this:
A choice was made to use obsolete, decades old retro pixel "art" as a substitute for contemporary PC graphics. It's unclear if this is due to lack of budget or talent, regardless, the overall visual quality of the game is extremely low as a result.
While there are options to change the resolution for the game, all this does is scale up the fixed resolution EDIT EDIT EDIT sprites/raster images/simplistic vector used to make the game, which makes little or no difference to the graphics quality. Without any other substantial graphics tweaks, it's not possible for gamers to improve the mediocre 2D visuals.
The developers didn't design the game for modern gaming PCs, as such the game resolution caps out at 1080p, a very low resolution that became mainstream back in 2006 and became obsolete when 4K entered the mainstream in 2014. The game simply won't look right on modern gaming displays due to this failure on the part of the developers.
Because this is a mobile app, it carries a number of deliberate design deficiencies. Compromises were made to cater to the iPhones that the game was designed for. These are unfortunate handicaps and limitations that PC gamers shouldn't be forced to accept, but it's evident that PC was an afterthough for the iPhone developers who are to blame for this. The game is deficient as a result of these choices, and would have been so much better without the handicaps that designing games for mobile phones forces upon a game. Once more, mobile devs have made gaming worse for everyone. I didn't spend thousands on building a gaming rig just so I could pretend it's an iPhone.
TaniNani didn't appeal much to the people who own a copy of the game, either. It has achievments, and they show us a very clear picture that the game didn't really capture any interest from gamers. The most commonly and easily attained achievement is for collecting all the crystals in the first game world, and only around 24 percent of players bothered to get that far before uninstalling the game, less than a quarter of the players. Hardly a success story, gamers just weren't all that interested in the game, probably for all the reasons mentioned above.
Once more we see greedy mobile devs trying to scam PC gamers. On Steam, this is $5 USD, on app stores, it's free. Mobile devs must learn PC gamers are not here to be gouged, and can't be expected to pay a premium for a free mobile game just because it's been lazily dumped on Steam. This is unacceptable disrespect for PC gamers. Because this can be played free elsewhere, and because of the other defects, it's impossible to recommend. Who do they think we are?
