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Tengami puzzles3/12/2023 But the real problems are that the game never achieves the density to be satisfying, and that it treats its great premise as an occasional reward for progress rather than the very basis of your interaction with it. With the amount of exploration and backtracking needed to solve some major puzzles, the slow movement is more tedious than relaxing. The playable pop-up book keeps turning back into an old-fashioned and rather simplistic point-and-click video game. In Tengami, you can change the world with a swipe, but only if you're standing in an incongruous, glowing interaction spot you can fold scenery to create new pathways, but then you have to wait and watch your paper avatar plod to the next screen. The Rare alumni at Nyamyam haven't been able to shed their traditional gaming habits. The pop-up-book conceit works wonderfully on iPad, although there are more imaginative papercraft-themed games on other formats, like Tearaway and Paper Mario.įireproof and Simogo seem to have understood that they are working in a new medium and need to come up with a new lexicon, a new grammar, and new pacing to suit. Fireproof's Room games and Simogo's fabulously chilling Year Walk are great examples - and obvious bedfellows for Tengami, with their use of riddle-solving and gesture controls to open new spaces. One of the great things about the mobile app markets is that they've created an environment where games can be small, intimate artworks that you can buy for loose change and spend a pleasurable hour or two turning over in your hands. It's over in 90 minutes - and it would have been a lot less if your character, a man on a quest to restore blossom to a dying tree, didn't walk so slowly.īrevity is no sin, of course. And a puzzle adventure needs puzzles, of which Tengami has few, and all but a couple are of feeble design. A pop-up book begs to tell a story, but Tengami is a mechanical MacGuffin hunt with no characters, no narrative, no substance or resonance beyond a couple of wistful haikus about seasons passing. Sadly, all that love and labour has resulted in little more than a nice idea and some gorgeous artwork in search of a game. This goodwill is only reinforced by your first sight of the game's luminous, delicate visuals, and the obvious tactile pleasure of manipulating its papercraft world on the touchscreen: sliding tabs to move things, or flipping the pages of the book over to create a new scene or viewpoint. Creative refugees from the corporate game factory, theirs is the sort of story that generates automatic goodwill. It was made over three years by Nyamyam, a tiny team formed in late 2010 by a couple of ex-Rare staffers, Jennifer Schneidereit and Phil Tossell. This brief yet languid puzzle adventure, which brings a pop-up book of traditional Japanese illustration to life, is an obvious labour of love.
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