Recent reviews by Jamiras

Play the mobile version instead.

Without the video boosts, the game is painfully slow. And more often than not, I lose a significant amount of progress when closing and returning to the game - it's like it only saves every half hour and not when exiting.

A unicode character walks into a bar...

Were you expecting a punchline? There isn't one, and that pretty much sums up this game.

From the very start you're thrown into the game without guidance. Instead of a main menu, the game starts in a empty room with a bunch of pillars and a diagram that looks like a control scheme selector. Instead, that's the sole instructions you'll receive for the entirety of the game. It took me five minutes to figure out even the most basic action - stand next to a wall and press space to break through. Using this on one of the pillars does some sort of four-dimensional fold into the main maze.

The rest of the game seems to be wandering around the randomly generated maze collecting books. There's no positive feedback indicating that you're doing things correctly, or any sort of gauge to indicate progress - just a counter on how many books you've collected. When you die, you're "score" will be shown, compared to previous runs and then you get to start over in the pillar room.

From looking at the other reviews, apparently a lot of people enjoyed this. I was just not one of them. To me, it felt more like a tech demo than any sort of game.

Promising game, poor execution.

There is no tutorial. There are a series of help pages explaining the different aspects of the game, but without any context. You start the game in your personal house (not even the shoppe) and are expected to find the shoppe and figure out what key(s) are required to put up some pedestals to display the handful of potions you can afford on your initial budget.

The first few days are spent waiting for customers to wander into your store and buy your limited inventory. Once you start turning a profit, you can expand to more inventory, and more customers will visit.

That's all fine and good, but having to manually restock the shelves after every purchase is tedious - especially as the number of customers increases. By the sixth day, I was doing my best to keep stuff on my shelves and gave up on any semblence of an orderly arrangement - spam click to deposit wares, open order form, refill stock, wait for delivery, repeat.

But the biggest problem is that to expand into new types of goods, you have to unlock them by spending points earned from experience, and experience is slow to come by. Fortunately, there's a button hidden on the quest page that will let you buy experience for money, but I'm still several days away from being able to afford it.

I wanted to like this game, but once I realized the available tiles were just the same eight being randomized every turn, I quickly lost interest. The only real challenge is the timer, which is artificially enforced by making the player drag their desired actions across the screen.

Culina: Hands in the Kitchen is a visual novel with light business-sim elements. The story was enjoyable, the art and music are great, but the business aspect is somewhat lacking. Coupled with the tedious process of restocking your inventory after each time you let customers into the restaurant, it almost gets in the way of the visual novel aspects. On the other hand, the simplicity means you don't have to worry too much about the imposed weekly profit goals. Additionally, increasing your relationships gives bonuses to the business interactions, so the parts do interact well with each other.

Recommended for people who like a little time management in their visual novels. 7/10.

The Hole Story is a simple adventure game where the solution to almost every puzzle is to dig something up. It's full of puns and amusing references. It looks a bit like an RPG, but does not have any RPG elements.

It only took me about half an hour for the playthrough where I finally completed the game. The first playthrough crashed on the way back after collecting the artichoke, and I got stuck (could not move) once on the second playthrough.

It's a unique, entertaining little game, especially considering the team behind it. But as short as it is, with limited replayability, and the bugs I encountered, it's hard to recommend it at $5. Grab it on sale and enjoy the brief little jaunt.

Fun on the early puzzles. Frustratingly hard on the later ones since it's nearly impossible to pick up the piece you want, even if it's clearly the one your mouse is over.

As others have pointed out, this game is very similar to the Professor Layton series - wander around talking to people and clicking on things to access puzzles. The puzzles themselves are the main part of the game. Most of them are enjoyable, and the interfaces for each type work well. However, when you do get stuck on one and have to skip it, you aren't provided with the solution and therefore cannot determine what you were doing wrong when trying to solve it. There is a story, and it tries to tie the puzzles together, but for the most part I spent my time simply wandering about looking for the next puzzle and skipping as much of the dialog as I could.

Bottom line: if you like puzzles and don't mind not being shown the solution to the ones you can't figure out, you'll probably enjoy this.