I feel more connected to the game's pop-up feel when I'm tugging structures out or folding them back in to create paths for myself I would happily play a game built singularly around its paper-layered mazes, no matter how difficult they got.Īs it is, I find the first two chapters of Tengami like slightly overcooked Wagyu beef: tough, a little dry, and not as rich or resplendent as they could be. I enjoy Tengami more when I have to directly affect its papercraft world to traverse it.
Backtracking at a snail's pace is a severe test of how much I appreciate my surroundings. When I say slow pace, I don't just mean the picturesque world, or the subtle narrative, but the literal speed at which my character walks, nay, plods through the environment. That said, the environmental puzzles of Tengami, which have me going back and forth and turning pages left and right to find clues hidden within the folds of paper, seems at odds with the deliberately slow pace of the game. What the trailer didn't show was her furrowing her brow at the tortuous puzzles.ĭon't get me wrong, I can dig a complicated, thorny puzzle – I loved trying to work out what to do with the clouds of Braid. A recent trailer showed a woman taking her iPad to a babbling brook, where she played the game against the serenity of an evergreen forest. Nyamyam wants players to feel a sense of wonder as they play Tengami, to enjoy just exploring it like they would any pop-up book. The technical aspects run even deeper, like how the book's look and feel is based on a natural Japanese paper that has watercolor-like gradients, or how its puzzling temples have their roots in the schematics of real Japanese shrines. As Nyamyam's Jennifer Schneidereit told me in September, a good year or so was spent on the 3D digital editor that makes the game's pop-ups mirror the physics of paper. Tengami is the creation of a three-man team, which explains why it took more than three years to create. Sliding to turn and fold the paper of its pop-up landscape is an elegant pleasure, and walking in its world and visiting its lovingly detailed shrines makes me wish I'd really taken the time to explore Tokyo's rich history, rather than spending all my hours and yen in Akihabara arcades – that was great too, but still. Its papercraft world, glossed in subtle, flowing shades of red, green, and blue, folds in and out frame-by-frame through some meticulous 3D wizardry.
Nyamyam's point-and-click (or point-and-tap) adventure draws inspiration from Japanese fairy tales, and when you see it in action for the first time it certainly feels magical. Days after having soaked in the culture of Tokyo's suburban streets, I played Tengami for the first time, and it was the perfect set up to blow me away.
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