Kuukiyomi: Consider It
Switch
Developer/publisher G-Mode Format Switch
Release Out now
The Japanese language is full of excellent disses – we are not sure our ego will ever recover from learning of unibare, the word for ‘everyone knows you’re wearing Uniqlo, and we’re embarrassed for you’. Now, thanks to this tongue-in-cheek puzzle game, we know of kuuki yomenai: a person who can’t read the room. In Kuukiyomi: Consider It, your number one goal as a player is to try to not be, as one might say in English, that guy.
Consider It’s main campaign presents you with 100 social situations and asks you to react to each in the manner you deem most appropriate. While the element of the scene that you control is always bright red, you end up steering a huge variety of things – birds, boyfriends, cursors, Tetris blocks and wrestlers among them – in your bid for social harmony. The controls are simple, with a face button or the analogue stick moving your scarlet avatar. Equally, there are some instances in which the best thing is not to interfere at all.
Early puzzles see you shuffling over to let a couple on the train sit together, or ringing a bell in good time to tell the bus driver you want to get off at the next stop. Interestingly, there are degrees of consideration to puzzle through, too: if your friends order beer, then you feel obliged to select one from the menu – but what if a pitcher were available? Things soon devolve into much sillier scenarios. It is poor form, perhaps, to be texting while a ghost is trying to scare you; instead of dropping that T-block into formation, you might want to use it to protect a gundam’s modesty. Running jokes and twists on previous puzzles are standouts, too: your first girlfriend might appreciate yakiniku for dinner, but trying that with a later squeeze might land you in hot water.
Well, hot water is a bit of an overstatement. There’s no punishment for behaving thoughtlessly, beyond the brief judgment you receive every five levels of exactly how considerate you managed to be. We’re glad of this, as the game misinterprets our intended actions a good 50 per cent of the time. As options are barely ever signposted in any concrete sense, we often miss our chance to be polite while we struggle to work out what input Consider It will allow us to perform. Some scenes are so inscrutable that we’re left bemused as to what’s transpired, and the summaries don’t do enough to explain how you might have improved your reaction.
Still, it’s frequently a source of surprise and delight that, even in situations involving alien abductions and Mario homages, we can tap into our innate social programming to ensure we’re playing our part correctly. An imperfect, but highly original game that pokes affectionate fun at the not only very Japanese, but very human, desire for everybody to get along.