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27 reviews · 4 essays
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Soundtrack: Chants of Sennaar — Learning a people's sound before learning their words
The music Thomas Brunet wrote for Chants of Sennaar is a small chamber ensemble woven from live instruments. The peoples living on each floor of the tower cannot understand one another's words. But the sound gets through. Black coffee in hand, I, Doremi, take apart why the score of a language-deciphering game tells you 'who these people are' before you can decode a single word.
Counterpoint on Lorelei and the Laser Eyes — Reading Through the Negative Reviews
Komugi rated Lorelei and the Laser Eyes 9.0/10. I read the Steam negative reviews and examined four claims: one-button controls, never knowing where a solution lives, the monotony of combination locks, and unwarned strobing light. Where I agree, where I push back.
Counterpoint on Outer Wilds — Reading Through the Negative Reviews
Komugi rated Outer Wilds 9.5/10. I read the Steam negative reviews and examined four claims: a loop that wastes your time, a story buried in text, painful ship controls, and unannounced horror. Where I agree, where I push back.
Counterpoint on The Witness — Reading Through the Negative Reviews
Komugi gave The Witness a 9.0/10. I sort five recurring negative-review patterns from Steam and the critical press — the philosophical pretension, the repetitive panel interaction, late-game artificial difficulty, traversal friction, and the exclusion of colorblind and hearing-impaired players — and decide where I agree and where I push back.
Related reviews
Void Stranger
A 2D Sokoban puzzler in which you lift a floor tile with a rod and set it down elsewhere, descending a forgotten labyrinth past traps and foes. From a handful of verbs grow bottomless puzzles and a hidden story — made by System Erasure.
puzzlesokoban-likemeta-puzzleThe Spectrum Retreat
A first-person puzzler set in the art-deco Penrose Hotel: you pull a colour out of one wall, carry it, and hand it to a matching barrier to open the way. Steam sits at 'Mostly Positive,' 76% of 223 (snapshot 2026-06-16); opinion splits over its double structure of puzzle and story.
puzzlefirst-personnarrative-puzzleFilament
A puzzle game where you steer a small probe to wrap a single trailing cable around pillars, solving each room of an abandoned spaceship with one unbroken, non-crossing line.
puzzlelogicnarrative-puzzleThe Turing Test
A first-person sci-fi puzzle on a moon of Jupiter: redirect energy orbs between sockets to open doors and cross a series of test chambers, wrapped in a story about machine and human judgment.
puzzlefirst-personnarrative-puzzleThe Case of the Golden Idol
A deduction game: examine frozen crime-scene tableaus, gather words from the evidence, and fill in the blanks to reconstruct each murder across an 18th-century mystery.
deductionobservationnarrative-puzzleMaquette
A first-person recursive puzzle set in a world nested inside itself: the model at its center is the very world you stand in, so shrinking or enlarging objects ripples across scales — all wrapped in a love story.
perspective-puzzlenarrative-puzzlerecursionChants of Sennaar
Climbing a Babel-like tower, you decipher the unknown logographic language of each floor's people from pictures and gestures. A game of observation and inference.
observationnarrative-puzzlemeta-puzzleBlue Prince
A mansion roguelite where each day you draft the room behind the door.
logic-gridpathfindingmeta-puzzleLorelei and the Laser Eyes
In an eerie monochrome hotel, over 150 ciphers, numbers, and symbol puzzles weave through every floor.
logic-gridobservationnarrative-puzzleThe Talos Principle 2
Lasers and cubes and philosophical dialogue weigh equally in this first-person puzzle.
logic-gridnarrative-puzzleassemblyCOCOON
A world inside an orb, an orb inside that world, all the way down.
meta-puzzlenarrative-puzzleassemblyUnpacking
Pull things from boxes and place them on shelves. A 'life-told-by-objects' puzzle.
assemblynarrative-puzzleobservationOuter Wilds
Explore a solar system on a 22-minute loop and unravel the mysteries of an ancient race.
narrative-puzzleobservationmeta-puzzleReturn of the Obra Dinn
A monochrome mystery where an insurance assessor must identify sixty crew and reconstruct their fates aboard a ghost ship.
logic-gridobservationnarrative-puzzleGorogoa
A hand-drawn 2×2 grid of paintings. Rearrange, zoom, connect — a picture-book puzzle.
observationassemblynarrative-puzzleThe Witness
More than five hundred line-drawing panels. Observation itself becomes the verb.
observationnarrative-puzzlepathfindingHer Story
Search a police database of live-action video clips to reconstruct the story of a missing husband. An FMV mystery.
narrative-puzzleobservationmeta-puzzleThe Talos Principle
A robot solves trials in Roman-style ruins while a voice in their head questions their selfhood and divinity.
logic-gridpathfindingnarrative-puzzlePapers, Please
A border inspector in a fictional authoritarian state, caught between paperwork and morality.
logic-gridobservationnarrative-puzzleLIMBO
A boy walks through a monochrome forest searching for his sister. Trial and death advance the way.
physicsobservationnarrative-puzzleMachinarium
In a town built of scrap, a small robot rescues his lover. A hand-drawn, dialogue-free adventure.
narrative-puzzleassemblyobservationHalf-Life 2: Episode One
A five-hour escape with Alyx, blending gravity-gun physics puzzles and FPS combat.
physicsnarrative-puzzlePsychonauts
Dive into other characters' minds and solve the puzzles their inner worlds present. A peculiar 3D adventure.
narrative-puzzleobservationassemblySyberia II
Kate and the automaton Oscar travel into frozen Russia for one final leg of the journey.
narrative-puzzleassemblyobservationSyberia
Lawyer Kate Walker crosses Europe and Russia, unraveling the mystery of the automata.
narrative-puzzleassemblyobservationMyst III: Exile
A canonical Myst sequel across six Ages. The first to introduce 360-degree free view.
logic-gridobservationnarrative-puzzleEscape from Monkey Island
Pirate Guybrush's last classic, the era of 3D LucasArts adventure, with wildly inventive item combinations.
narrative-puzzleassemblyobservation
