KAMiBAKO - Mythology of Cube - Steam Charts & Stats

Very unique blend of JRPG, city building, magic terraforming and a very unique satisfying method of exploration where map tiles come to life as you move through them uncovering quests or secrets. A small match-3 puzzle segment is used for clearing the land of "fragmentation" which basically cleanses it. Very unique and a very compelling blend of mechanics.

I really can recommend this game. The battle system, combined with the crafting system, is a lot of fun. Exploring the map and especially dungeons feels also really rewarding. This is completed by a village building system, which really goes hand in hand with the crafting system. By building small villages, additional goods will be available in the cities/villages around. If you ever played Dark Cloud/Dark Chronicles, you'll really like it :) The game isn't perfect (the puzzles are redundant - after finishing a few of them it becomes boring, the food system gets obsolete as soon as you unlock cooking), but it is really enjoyable and the synergy of the different systems is great!

When I was doing the little introduction to city building and the game started to tell me about local precipitation levels and its potential impact on my city, I suddenly knew what sort of game I was playing and I was completely on board. There isn't an absolutely distressing level of depth to the games systems, but neither is it so shallow to be utterly boring. The game manages to sit in a sweet spot of simply being fun and engaging without drifting too far either way. Even things like the little colour cube connecting mini game that I worried was going to outstay it's welcome is given enough mechanics fed into it to be a core part of the gameplay, probably representing almost as much time as combat does without making me dread it occuring. I've never played a game from the studio before or even heard of them, but I'm glad I've tried this one on a whim.

wow this is super fun and chill, yet keeps my brain engaged adventure, exploration, rpg, crafting, land development felt like the core of this game, puzzle is just something to generate resources and unlocking areas btw, monsters here givin me ragnarok online vibe, was it gravity as well? **EDITED: midgame to endgame feels boring, same dungeon mechanic, just stronger repeated enemies. Town management is broken, can get u tons of money and unlimited resources to the point that u have no purpose in looking for more resources. Weapon crafting is very frustrating, save scumming all the way till u get what u want. This game could be better if its not that shallow

First of all, a PSA: game runs on steamdeck! The game takes a while to get going, but once you get past the tutorial phase and unlock city building and cooking, it's a fun mix of exploration, RPG and management game. None of the gameplay elements are particularly difficult and the storytelling is kinda shallow, but the synergy of it all makes it so that there is always something to do for you. For those who remember a somewhat older title named Dark Cloud, this is what the game reminded me of. But I'd say that those who enjoy the Atelier series (gameplay wise), might also have fun with Kamibako. In retrospect I wouldn't pay full price for it again, but it's an easy recommend, if you manage to grab it on a discount.

I have to give the game props for attempting some new things but being that it's part 1 of a slew of games without mention is really frustrating. The game also suffers from being very repetitive. Every time I go to start the game I can't get myself to click play because I feel like after 10 hours I've seen pretty much what the game has to offer and that my time would be better spent elsewhere.

I agree with the other reviewer saying that it is weird that there are almost no reviews yet (at the moment, half a day after release there are only 2 reviews posted). Most likely it's because devs didn't give a release discount which means that people are not in a hurry to buy the game. There are also no discussions about this game mechanics on forum and its weird because there is a system which should spawn at least several questions early. The game looked somewhat unique based on store page so that thing intrigued me. I played it for 6 hours and yes, the game is still interesting to me. The combat is simple - you have a character which at the beginning of the turn drains mana from environment and feeds it to one of the other characters. After that other characters and enemies get a turn and hit each other automatically but if you managed to charge ally's skill with mana you can press a button to activate it at any moment during their turn. There are simple minigames which give you 8 or 10 turns to collect required amount of points by playing a match-3 puzzle with modified rules (you can drag one tile whereever you want and all tiles of the same color which were next to it in the beginning will follow it and you collect all connected tiles of the same color at release). There is some crafting where you combine three resource types to craft a weapon and it gets different affinities against different enemy types and different skills but I wasn't able to craft anything useful with it yet. The part that interested me the most about this game is that you can make your own settlements. The idea is that you uncover the world, each square has a list of resources that it can produce and you can place a settlement and build buildings getting those resources. You can collect resources yourself from time to time and they go into your inventory, but if settlement reaches size 5 and is properly surrounded by walls with a gate then gate gets connected to the main road and settlement starts delivering 3 of its resources to all other settlements connected to the main road. This unlocks the ability to buy new items in other settlements, including default ones. I am still learning how to use this system because rules for placing walls correctly and combining several squares into one settlement are not obvious, but it's pretty fun to use and learn it. So I recommend the game just because this feature exists.

Still early, early in the game so the review may change as time goes on but so far the basic mechanics and systems seem really cool! Kinda wild to me there's no other reviews, but if the game continues playing the way it does right now and builds on its systems some more, I'd heartily recommend the game. Varied mechanics, a number of systems to invest time into, and a pretty fun world to explore.

So far the game has kept me engaged over the two hour mark. There is a constant sense of progression that comes through in multiple layers. For example, you uncover and restore the land; you can build and expand townships that produce various resources for you and trade goods that are exchanged with other towns; there are several npcs that offer quests throughout the game; and you can level your companions through combat. None of these aspects of the game offer a ton of depth (aside from maybe the building of townships), but they are fairly engaging when you put them all together and they are certainly more fleshed out than similar mechanics in other lower budget titles. I think I will remain interested in playing the game for at least as long as it takes me to figure out whether and how these systems and mechanics come together to form game that is worth completing. There are also several things that I think are going to potentially bog down my experience with this game. The control scheme is very non-traditional for a JRPG. The game also involves navigating multiple menus with transition screens that take a long time to load. I am also worried that the puzzle aspect of the gameplay might wear out its welcome, although it does seem like more mechanics will be introduced over time; this is particularly concerning because I just opened up the second section of the map, and it is covered with puzzles. I am going to recommend the game for now. The devs behind the game are doing some interesting things and I am happy to support them. If I change my mind, I will try to update this review. Before I go, I will just add that anyone who wants to buy this game and do a two hour test run, I think that it will be hard to get a feel for the game in that amount of time, and I am not sure how much content is in the demo.

Its not a bad game, but its not a game the majority of people will want to play and even those that do, its extremely unlikely anyone will want to complete a lot of the content it offers. The game has a refreshing amount of challenge at several points and the game has sufficient tools to make it interesting. This is entirely on the combat. Its possible to tackle higher level enemies or complicated bosses by planning ahead and gearing up appropriately, which in turn requires farming for the materials for crafting gear. Planning out combat to meet this difficulties is almost the entirety of the intellectual side of the challenge of the game. Quite a few enemies basically require wiping out to figure them out and then coming back to tackle them geared up. Dungeons similarly are difficult in so much one has to measure resource expenditure vs regeneration and how long one can sustain said expenditure (since checkpoints are only every 5 floors you want to ensure you can reach the next benchmark). The downside is that dungeons become EXTREMELY repetitive, there is no variance in enemies within the floors (except a final boss on the last floor and because of procedural generation sometimes the final floor boss isn't necessary to complete the dungeon either). Once one finds a way to complete a set of 5 floors and can do so reliably the dungeon is "solved", which is a problem when its a set of 60 or 80 floors. This is compounded by the game speed. The game animations and movement are glacial. 95% of combat is spent in animations and it takes WAAAAY too long for something one basically spends most of the game doing. A dungeon floor with 2 encounters will take around 12 or so minutes simply because the combat opening animation and even the running away animations take so long. This means that on a set of 80 floors one is looking at several very long gaming sessions simply from entering combat and having to watch the opening animation, even if one runs away you still have to watch the exit animation. This makes dungeons a colossal waste of time since there's no challenge beyond the first 5 floors and the literal last floor. You either solved the sustainability puzzle or you don't, but you will have to redo it over and over and over and over. Even using speedhacks to set the game speed to x2 it still will feel slow. The city building is engaging but mechanically hollow. Building towns is mainly for generating resources, resources used to build more towns. There are a number of crafting items and purchasable weapons and armors that are unique to having town combinations with specific resources being exported, but none of those is superior to what one finds naturally delving dungeons. The closest to fast travel (outside of very very limited teleportation points that one cannot teleport to at-will but only from other teleport points meaning one has to walk to them if they want to teleport to another teleport point) is carriages that fundamentally only go from and to other player created towns (there's only 6 towns in game with a carriage point, and they only connect to one other town (so 3 pairs) on a significantly colossal map), so in a sense, fast travel is at the discretion of the player foresight when town building. In that sense there IS an incentive to town building but functionally speaking the mechanic is entirely accessory to the game challenge and story content, there's only one quest that requires player town interaction and said quest doesn't even mention that the item it requires is specific to this "trade" mechanic. For something that consumes so much time and resources one would expect more involvement or reward, and while the aspect is VERY enticing and one can find fun on it as well as appealing to the aesthetic side of the experience, its not a well design system. There's a lot of frustrating aspects which the game doesn't explain and there's a lot of secret interactions that aren't fun to discover because how much investment testing those things out requires as well as the gain being minimal in comparison to just going to a dungeon. Finally and perhaps the most damming for most since it will affect casual and enthusiasts. The game is, while not explicitly on its name or title, clearly intended to be part 1 of a much larger saga. The game ends without finalizing any of its companion quests in any way. A lot of lore is left hanging for more developments, character plotlines do not finish, even the credits indicate that there's more to come and the last quest in the game outright tells the player there's more to come sending the player to an area that doesn't exist before rolling credits. Additionally there's a specific area of the map unrelated to the main quest that the player is told to access later but isn't actually accessible (I checked in the game files for it and found the area is actually empty) meaning even existing areas are not fully realized, likely intended to be revisited in sequels. The game is extremely full of content and there's hundreds of hours of it. But a lot of it is fundamentally fetch quests some of them, very frustratingly, unmarked. A lot of that time is being spent in combat animations rather than actually making meaningful decisions in combat as well. The main story does not conclude but is clearly part 1 of what's intended to be a larger saga. And the final set of quests were very clearly rushed through translation with some very nonsensical dialogue intersped all throughout and some VERY bizarre terminology thrown in out of nowhere that makes it seem like someone completely different and unrelated to whoever translated the rest of the game was the one to work on it. Overall there's enjoyable parts and the first few hours show how promising a lot of what the game does is. But at the end, anybody that decides to engage with the game for an extended period of time (which is more or less required simply because of walking times and the size of the map as well as the nature of hte main quest) is going to run into all of this issues and come out very frustrated from the experience or will leave the game unfinished. And if they don't ... they will find out that it's only designed as part 1 of a larger saga, which isn't mentioned anywhere in the game title or marketing, which might make some people say the game itself is unfinished. Its hard to impossible to recommend the game. Some might enjoy playing it intermittently for a few hours every week (for a few years before completing it), but anybody thinking about sitting down and finishing the game will rapidly burn out or reach the end and feel profoundly unsatisfied for their investment.