Tengami is a beautifully crafted puzzle-adventure game set within a Japanese pop-up book. You’ll need to slide and fold your way through to solve the puzzles.
In Tengami, you’ll be exploring the beautifully crafted world to solve the puzzles within. The puzzles themselves are pretty basic, though still tricky at times. Sometimes you’ll need to pay attention to specific parts of the design and sometimes you’ll need to come up with the right combination to get where you need to go. Regardless, some of them are likely to really make you think, or perhaps sometimes you’ll even need to backtrack a bit to get the solution you need!
Sadly, the backtracking can sometimes take a fair bit of time. Your character has one movement speed – walk. While the world isn’t overall “large”, because of the movement speed it sure does feel that way. You’ll need to constantly click to point to where you want to go as well, as once your character makes it to where you had said he stops. While this movement speed definitely lets you enjoy the world more, there was definitely times where I was wanting to move 
faster just to get to where I needed to go.
Fortunately, that’s about where my issues end with the game. While I did need to pull up a walkthrough for some of the later puzzles, I was able to work my way through the rest. If you get stuck, the game has a built-in hint system that will give you a vague hint as to what to do. After that, it’s up to you to interpret it. Sometimes all you may need to do is just explore a bit more to find what you need.
There are some point where you can tell the game was more meant for a touch pad, however it is definitely still VERY workable with a mouse. Considering the game was previously on iOS and Wii U before this, it makes sense that this would be the case. Again though, the game still plays very well on PC.
As mentioned before, the artstyle of Tengami is absolutely beautiful. The music is also quite well done, though some of the transitions from actual music into background sounds does sound a bit jarring.
When I played through the game I ended up doing it in one sitting. There was some points where I had wanted to take a small break, however I’d read on the Steam forums that there was an issue with save files. As-of this writing though, it would seem this has been fixed. While it’s tempting to go and replay it, there’s definitely a bit of the “I’ve already solved all the puzzles so some of the enjoyment is gone” present.
Tengami is, overall, an exceptionally well-crafted puzzle title. For anyone who is looking for an artsy puzzle-adventure game, and especially if you’re interested in Japan, then check this out. It’s definitely very high on my recommendation list, even if there isn’t as much urge to replay it due to already knowing all the solutions to the puzzles. And hey, even if you do get stuck, the games website has a handy-dandy walkthrough!
Tengami Review Score
4/5
I would like to thank Nyamyam for providing me with a copy of the game for review.
Tengami is available now on Steam.
