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

small hidden gem, puzzles gave me a run for my money though

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.

Quite a good game for someone's second go at creating something. The story is absolutely something rich, the puzzles are something I think most unique, and wished it could be expanded on in some sequel. The endings that let you do your desires or not, its freeing compared to other games, and the changes in the story depending on the swapping of genders or completion is a nice touch. The ost I actually really like, Sunny Sigh being my favourite as it just feels so resigned to the SuperEgo, Endgame being the most focused, Twin Desires being the most depressing, but absolutely right to how the bad endings play out. I wonder if I should make a video about this game's full scope, as I've data-mined it, this game is made in godot ( the best engine I personally think ). Wish walking was able to be faster and more "free-er" as in after opening a door, I could immediately start moving so I wasn't stand there watching fade outs. In fact there's a lot of fading and fade out time like when getting to watch a memory, which can be a bit annoying when trying to complete endings ( which is why I have it unfinished, but data-mining gets me more than I could ever want for dialog anyways ) I... really feel like this game has potential, as long as it made the puzzles more easier to do. I've seen a note about making it a mouse click and drag, and I think that would've been nice, but also a guide-line so that when pieces are placed down I could see where they'd hit. This is because my eyes can't track properly the shogi board, because there's almost no lines I could see, its hard to guess where the horse will land, leading me to just spamming it on different locations, this is lesser with chess board, but if it gets too big, it nearly becomes impossible. I love this game, re-ignited my passion for yuri, and I think I will make a game in honor of it. ( Don't think I am good at pixel art either... ) If there was a sequel, I'd hope Mayu to be alongside Fifi in it, it felt lonely to solve the trials with only Mayu, who's speechless about lots of things so I can't read her. And every other character in the real world are ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥. I sympathize with Mayu, I have done similar things as her and similarily, if Fifi was my childhood friend, I'd have fallen in love the same. Id seems awesome, Super ego is just kinda trying her best in her own way. Ego ( Mayu ) seems to just let it happen, but since we decide her actions, it wouldn't matter much anyways, we would be her Ego in that case. I'd bet that if the creator was an artist, they'd have drawn more art for the game than it has currently, but best of a bad situation. Thanks for making the music room, dev "room", and adding those extra lines of dialog for foswap and moswap. Its kinda like going to the theatre and getting another scene at the end credits, satisfies the soul. I never liked yumi nikki, or omori that much, I just skipped past them for the story and feels usually, but this time I think I liked the ost, the unique puzzle design which I stayed for a while but solving old puzzles again that I forgot the solution to, made me tired, so I used the shortcut, otherwise if there was more linear design of which door to go to, I think the difficulty spike would be easier to handle! Similarily I didn't like pixel art, pixel sounds much either, but your game changes my mind a little, I think pixel art is fine for games if they're detailed enough, sometimes there are games that just use it for quickening their development, but these characters are what we stare at most, it doesn't feel like the same person if it is pixel art, and then line art, its too much whiplash. The puzzles could be very fun to play, because I was having so much fun listening to the sounds of claiming another pawn, its like a feeling of one step closer to the end, the sound design for the puzzle is nice. Could be very fun to play as in, being able to zoom in, making the camera follow the chess piece itself as it goes along, when hitting a block and stopping or going back around, making the pawn shift towards the direction, it just familiarizes the player a lot better with what's happening ( I didn't know why my horse kept randomly stopping on the walls ) As a game developer who've seen many, and only stares for the unique ones deeply, there's definitely... A big opportunity for something, you just do it right on the sequel, I'll be there supporting you.

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.

Immensely enjoyable despite it's faults. NO SPOILERS The bad: The art isn't very consistent, and there are a few odd decisions made in the design like unnecessary confirmation prompts, but they didn't interfere with my enjoyment of the game very much at all. EXCEPT for the movement speed. I was constantly wishing I could move faster, but even that only became annoying when I was repeating content for all the different endings. A lot of background info for the setting is placed in basically "lore books". These are completely optional, so if you don't want to spend around half an hour just reading them, you might miss some interesting info. Obviously it would be ideal if this information was naturally included in the game's narrative, but I understand why the dev made the decision to do it like this. I didn't mind at all, but this goes in the negatives section by default. The good: The puzzles are interesting and very unique. The concept is very original as far as I know, and they were enjoyable to solve (save for one or two that I got stuck on for a while). If you don't like the puzzles, or are just here for the story/characters, you can skip them by pressing backspace. Speaking of the story, it's very good! The writing is great and I would say it's the strongest point of the game. It starts a little slow in the first act, but never felt like a drag to get through. Total length is fairly short too, so nothing overstays its welcome. I enjoyed every minute of it, and went out of my way to test out different combinations of choices just to see the small changes in the dialogue and endings. As for the characters, the star of the show is the cute blonde girl. She's the best, I love her. She's sassy and annoying. She makes bad jokes and insults the protagonist. She can be incredibly rude and selfish too. So basically she's perfect... Jokes aside, she and the protagonist are very well written, and the look inside their heads that we get really makes them grow on you. Even the side characters were interesting and compelling additions to the story 10/10. (btw the dev says they weren't completely satisfied with Fifield's sprites, but I think the artist knocked it out of the park). Finally, the music. I'm not the type to actively focus very much on background music, but I can still say this: it's good. I genuinely did enjoy the OST and each piece fit the scene where it played very well and contributed to my enjoyment. Overall I'd highly recommend giving it a try, even if you're not into the puzzle aspect of the game (just skip them if you want). I wish the dev had more time to polish this up to it's maximum potential because it deserves it. As it stands, it's still great and most importantly, I wish I had more of it.

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