Critical Play: Puzzles

I played Tengami, developed by nyamnam, which turned out to be one of the coolest games I’ve ever played. When trying to figure out why I like this game so much, I keep coming back to the art style. The game starts and ends with its art: an intricate world crafted out of gorgeously layered, colorful paper. I was consistently blown away by the scenery they were able to craft with these layers, and the use of paper as a medium made me feel like I was traversing a Tolkeinian tale, something that had been etched out carefully in a novel years ago, not coded in unity or something similar. The puzzles feel incredibly well fit into the game, most of them early on involve folding the paper over to get to a place you need to progress. The puzzles are fully baked into the environment, and can be hard to spot if not for little glowing circles showing you where you are able to click and drag to fold. That makes it much more immersive, for instance it would have been a lot less immersive if you got to a spot and a modal popped up on screen with a puzzle to solve. Overall, the game just let you walk through a gorgeous world and solve fun puzzles.

About the author

Leave a Reply

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.