Recent reviews by KOI_4878

15 puzzles 20 achievements, for free~

If you are good at jigsaw puzzles, can get everything done within 1 hour.

I started the game in English and when I found out that lovely background music was composed by a Canadian Chinese immigrant who coded this game when he was in the college more than ten years ago, I immediately changed the language setting to Chinese Mandarin and restarted the game.

That was the best decision ever.

The conversations between Dr. Eva Rosalene and Dr. Neil Watts suddenly make so much sense. The banters were hilarious, and they used so many unique funny lines that could totally get lost in translation.

For example, 放鸽子啦，真是柯达一刻啊！
Literal translation: Free the pigeons, what a Kodak moment!
That makes no sense.
However the actual meaning is Got stood up, legend!

If anyone feels the game dialogues are absurd or horrendous, I highly recommend you replay the game in Chinese language setting. Yes, you do need to learn the language first.

It’s not that difficult nowadays with TikTok refugees fleeing to Little Red Note app, and 216% surge in Americans learning Mandarin on Duolingo.

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Sometimes you’ll find references back to high school textbooks, and that’s because the game was wrote by someone who just finished high school.

For example, it mentioned that the birthplace of the discovery of America Palos de la Frontera. Álvar Pérez de Guzmán was fourteen when Juan I of Castille granted him Palos de la Frontera and Villalba del Alcor as compensation.

This is not a spoiler, just some texts copied from a book placed within the game, irrelevant to the main story.

I have no idea what I was doing in high school, not mention to carry out such a big project - create For River, Once Upon a Memory, The Earth to Your Sky, write the story, code the game, and publish it.

None of these are easy. For that, I think it deserves a thumb up.

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To implant an idea into someone’s subconscious, you would need to find a few small twists or hints, travelling through their dreams or memories. That idea is very popular during the time (i.e. 10 years ago) mostly due to the movie Inception.

Moon or Mars are undeveloped, remote and deserted. I'm terrible at hardcore survival games. So I cannot relate myself to the NASA ending.

When Johnny was four, that was this unforgettable (but had to forget) alluring starry night, he looked up into the sky filled with vibrant, swirling stars, met a beautiful girl who is different from all others.

She was sharing this weird idea that those blinking stars are the lighthouses of the cosmos. And she’s one of them, and will be friend with one.

They made up a constellation: a rabbit with the moon as its belly and were agreed to meet again next year.

Johnny gave her a toy Platypus. From that day, she’s no longer feeling isolated, and always bring the Platypus with her wherever she goes.

The lighthouse is where they first met, where they had first dance, where they got married, and where they had most of romantic memories together.

I feel her, but I don’t think I’ll keep a toy Platypus for that many years, and don’t think I’ll obsessed with a lighthouse and name it Anya, which reminds me of Anya Forger from Spy x Family.

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Another observation is Dr. Watts. No one mentioned about it before.

Dr. Watts tried to hold Dr. Rosalene’s hand when they were watching the rocket launch together, but she refused.

At the end of the game, the screen flashed / glitched a bit after Dr. Watt turned around and collected a memory piece?

If that is true, then the whole game is actually Dr. Watt’s dream or subconscious that he was trying to win Dr. Rosalene’s heart as his dying wish.

Hmm...just like Shin’ichi Hoshi's sci-fi stories, a funny twist ending.

Bought it for the achievement letters A-Z to decorate my Steam Profile.

So far still can't believe I just beat the game, some puzzles are not easy at all.

It’s a brilliant game.
This game has more than ten endings.
• Work – not that important, only one ending requires you to achieve 100/100.
• Health – not that important, alcohol cures / recovers it.
• Money – not that important, a little trick earns you a fortune – just keep rolling the tricks and spend all your fortune at the bar.
So, you might ask, what is important?
The answer is to look for life partners – a partner that is rich and powerful enough that you don’t need to work for a living.
It’s either your boss, your coworker, a dragon knight, a rich brat, a skeleton, etc.
Remember to interact with her/him continuously for three days. Do not get distracted by other NPCs and spend the rest of the day sleeping on the park bench.
Yes, the best way to reach multiple endings and pass the time is to nap on a bench.
Good luck!

Edith Finch, I thought she is Bertrand Russell’s fourth wife.
Nope.
It’s a 2–3-hour long game that explains the death of 12 Finch family members, because of bad parenting, reckless decision making, and unfortunate tragic circumstances. Finch is a Norwegian American family that built its family cemetery first, even before their new house – only one within a generation gets to live.
According to the development team, they got a bunch of brilliant mini game ideas and was going to make it a scenario that is similar to The Canterbury Tales. Basically puzzled up those ideas together into a family tree, then mapped out the whole story.
That explains why there are tons of very creative ideas in this game. However, the whole emotion is sad and depressed. Can’t it be designed with a happy game setting like It Takes Two? Big rich families have mental health issues, and their kids die young. What a tragedy!
To name a couple of brilliant game-plays - Barbara’s story was told within comic book pages, and Lewis’ fantasy world amazed my multiple times regards to its storytelling and keyboard controls.
Soon or later, there will be another studio picking up one or two cool game ideas out of this game and make it into a new jolly happy game.

The game would be unplayable if your SPACE bar is broken.
Fortunately, my SPACE bar works.
Yet in the past two hours, I had to keep hitting SPACE bar, for hundreds of times, in order to have all “Achievement Required” conversations with the 50-ish NPCs.
100% Achievement can be accomplished within 2 hours, and the game file is 2021 version - it stopped updates after the main game director, designer and writer Mohammad Fahmi (also the creator of game Coffee Talk) passed away in March 2022.
The game is about listening to ghosts’ problems and helping them. In Buddhism and Hinduism, both believe in reincarnation, after life and spirits in animals and plants, so you got to talk to some subway passengers, a baby, an owl, a cat, a dog, a monkey, some mushrooms, a giraffe, and an elephant, all in the spirit world.
Before you enter the spirit world, you can hear what people talking and thinking within the subway train, and topics mostly to be music, family, work, games, relationships, and of course daily chores.
After you entered the spirit world, ghosts started to realize there will be no work, no money anxiety, and most importantly, nothing is unhealthy – felt like a nice place to be.
Although one ghost was a bit special, and he was asking what the theological and metaphysical implications of this in the importance of humanity are.
I thumb up this game because of one NPC, who mentioned that the living world is but an egg, which is an idea from one of my favourite short stories.
If you haven’t heard of it before, here’s the story.
The Egg
By: Andy Weir
You were on your way home when you died.
It was a car accident. Nothing particularly remarkable, but fatal nonetheless. You left behind a wife and two children. It was a painless death. The EMTs tried their best to save you, but to no avail. Your body was so utterly shattered you were better off, trust me.
And that’s when you met me.
“What… what happened?” You asked. “Where am I?”
“You died,” I said, matter-of-factly. No point in mincing words.
“There was a… a truck and it was skidding…”
“Yup,” I said.
“I… I died?”
“Yup. But don’t feel bad about it. Everyone dies,” I said.
You looked around. There was nothingness. Just you and me. “What is this place?” You asked. “Is this the afterlife?”
“More or less,” I said.
“Are you god?” You asked.
“Yup,” I replied. “I’m God.”
“My kids… my wife,” you said.
“What about them?”
“Will they be all right?”
“That’s what I like to see,” I said. “You just died and your main concern is for your family. That’s good stuff right there.”
You looked at me with fascination. To you, I didn’t look like God. I just looked like some man. Or possibly a woman. Some vague authority figure, maybe. More of a grammar school teacher than the almighty.
“Don’t worry,” I said. “They’ll be fine. Your kids will remember you as perfect in every way. They didn’t have time to grow contempt for you. Your wife will cry on the outside, but will be secretly relieved. To be fair, your marriage was falling apart. If it’s any consolation, she’ll feel very guilty for feeling relieved.”
“Oh,” you said. “So what happens now? Do I go to heaven or hell or something?”
“Neither,” I said. “You’ll be reincarnated.”
“Ah,” you said. “So the Hindus were right,”
“All religions are right in their own way,” I said. “Walk with me.”
You followed along as we strode through the void. “Where are we going?”
“Nowhere in particular,” I said. “It’s just nice to walk while we talk.”
“So what’s the point, then?” You asked. “When I get reborn, I’ll just be a blank slate, right? A baby. So all my experiences and everything I did in this life won’t matter.”
“Not so!” I said. “You have within you all the knowledge and experiences of all your past lives. You just don’t remember them right now.”
I stopped walking and took you by the shoulders. “Your soul is more magnificent, beautiful, and gigantic than you can possibly imagine. A human mind can only contain a tiny fraction of what you are. It’s like sticking your finger in a glass of water to see if it’s hot or cold. You put a tiny part of yourself into the vessel, and when you bring it back out, you’ve gained all the experiences it had.
“You’ve been in a human for the last 48 years, so you haven’t stretched out yet and felt the rest of your immense consciousness. If we hung out here for long enough, you’d start remembering everything. But there’s no point to doing that between each life.”
“How many times have I been reincarnated, then?”
“Oh lots. Lots and lots. An in to lots of different lives.” I said. “This time around, you’ll be a Chinese peasant girl in 540 AD.”
“Wait, what?” You stammered. “You’re sending me back in time?”
“Well, I guess technically. Time, as you know it, only exists in your universe. Things are different where I come from.”
“Where you come from?” You said.
“Oh sure,” I explained “I come from somewhere. Somewhere else. And there are others like me. I know you’ll want to know what it’s like there, but honestly you wouldn’t understand.”
“Oh,” you said, a little let down. “But wait. If I get reincarnated to other places in time, I could have interacted with myself at some point.”
“Sure. Happens all the time. And with both lives only aware of their own lifespan you don’t even know it’s happening.”
“So what’s the point of it all?”
“Seriously?” I asked. “Seriously? You’re asking me for the meaning of life? Isn’t that a little stereotypical?”
“Well it’s a reasonable question,” you persisted.
I looked you in the eye. “The meaning of life, the reason I made this whole universe, is for you to mature.”
“You mean mankind? You want us to mature?”
“No, just you. I made this whole universe for you. With each new life you grow and mature and become a larger and greater intellect.”
“Just me? What about everyone else?”
“There is no one else,” I said. “In this universe, there’s just you and me.”
You stared blankly at me. “But all the people on earth…”
“All you. Different incarnations of you.”
“Wait. I’m everyone!?”
“Now you’re getting it,” I said, with a congratulatory slap on the back.
“I’m every human being who ever lived?”
“Or who will ever live, yes.”
“I’m Abraham Lincoln?”
“And you’re John Wilkes Booth, too,” I added.
“I’m Hitler?” You said, appalled.
“And you’re the millions he killed.”
“I’m Jesus?”
“And you’re everyone who followed him.”
You fell silent.
“Every time you victimized someone,” I said, “you were victimizing yourself. Every act of kindness you’ve done, you’ve done to yourself. Every happy and sad moment ever experienced by any human was, or will be, experienced by you.”
You thought for a long time.
“Why?” You asked me. “Why do all this?”
“Because someday, you will become like me. Because that’s what you are. You’re one of my kind. You’re my child.”
“Whoa,” you said, incredulous. “You mean I’m a god?”
“No. Not yet. You’re a fetus. You’re still growing. Once you’ve lived every human life throughout all time, you will have grown enough to be born.”
“So the whole universe,” you said, “it’s just…”
“An egg.” I answered. “Now it’s time for you to move on to your next life.”
And I sent you on your way.

An idea came up during COVID-19, the couple brought it to life and presented it at 2021 Gamescom, got experts’ help on music, polishing and publishing, and now it’s one of the most beautiful games about language puzzles - a perfect mix of Heaven’s Vault and Manifold Garden based on the myth of Babel Tower.
The game created a better version of Babel Tower than Babel novels. In R. F. Kuang’s Babel, Britain's global economic and colonial supremacy are fueled by magical silver bars, which powered by capturing what is "lost in translation" between words in different languages that have similar, but not identical, meanings, where you have to read out both languages as spells in Harry Porter.
This game is different. Visual image is worth a thousand words. Players get to guess the meaning of a foreign word, and its equivalency in a different culture environment.
Often, it’s easy to guess the grapheme’s meaning from observing NPC’s interactions and wall arts. Although they use different grammar and rules to structure a sentence yet it’s a simplified version compared to real life rules of any language.
The real challenge starts with creating the links. i.e. to translate all five fictional languages to each other, which has its own set of rules of plural form, sequence of what comes first in a sentence, etc.
Another noteworthy aspect of this game is its bright color palette. It brings colors of contrast together beautifully – purple background with small yellow lights, yellow background with pink and green objects. It’s so eye-pleasing, feel like summer treats.
During the real ending, the whole world transformed from harmony to a deserted and glitched world. It just reminds me of “The empire, long divided, must unite; long united, must divide.” from Romance of the Three Kingdoms. I cannot believe that with all my efforts to translate and link all castes, all of a sudden, NPCs all disappeared and an aggressive animal, attacking and destroying everything in its way. It turns out that’s just another VR world.
That 10 minutes, I experienced an emotional roller coaster. The game ends on a high note.

Clam man is a great IP, and has potential to be added into the universe of Rick and Morty. It is not easy to make a game, not mention to have it packed with punchlines and jokes, a system to personalize traits and some dices to randomize outcomes.

After reading about this solo game programmer, I’ll just put out a thumb up here and hope for this game to become Overwhelmingly Positive one day.

Outdated software, not playable if you have a game mouse and PS5 controller.

Can't use PS5 controller to move and adjust camera.
So I had to use mouse to control camera.
Game mouse has high sensitivity and speed.
So I had to adjust cursor speed down.

I tried Steam Link ipad too, the camera view was spinning around crazy.
Just can't imagine how to fight battles with this dizzy viewpoint, unbearable.

It's a good story and good game, please remake it.

After playing more than a dozen of different cat finding games, this artist's drawing style is my favorite.
Among all 100 cats, I love the one stretching and yawning.
This game reminds me of an award winning children's book Millions of Cats (1928) by Wanda Gág. The plot is that an old man went home with his parade of cats and was told can only keep one, the prettiest one. It ends up with a major catfight and by the time it's all quiet outside, only one ugly skinny cat left because no cats thought its a threat and did not get killed. Anyway, I don't like the takeaway of this story, and prefer to find my inner peace in this calm game.
You spend 3-10 minutes finding all the cats, and the last three cats are the most difficult to find if you don't use hints.
Yeah, I had to use one or two hints to get 100% achievements.