ShyChess Reviews

i find this game to be good . it the players work on their memory skills to helping the shygirls to get out alive

This is way more fun than people expect. It just takes a while to understand exactly how the mechanics work, but otherwise 100% recommended.

It's a very boring puzzle game based on chess mechanics with many mistakes that tries to sell itself with lewd girls and it just does everything very poorly. I'm sure the puzzles continue to get harder but the game is just awful and you can't even tab in/out from fullscreen easily. I don't need more playtime to hate this, it's just not good from the start.

I chess play, I know the move of each piece by heart. Walk in with confidence, walk out with 7 cheat sheets and tired eyes.

Surprisingly well written and a bit of a difficult puzzler (hint use graph paper to make your life easier). I also love the art style and the play on Shy Guys from the Mario games. For the price this is a must buy for puzzle fans. The only think that I didn't particularly care for was the music. It sort of fits, but it's pretty bland and a bit grating if you are listening to it long term. Oh and the full screen mechanic kept messing with my computer when I would try and exit it. Overall it's a short and sweet with a story and characters that left me wanting more, which is always a good sign for an up and coming indie developer. Awesome job!

[h1] This is a hell of a puzzle game [/h1] I thank the maker of this fine puzzle-art. In combination with chess, which I really love to play and which was the reason why I tried it, this game has brought a whole new perspective on chess to me. Crazy as hell. Sometimes the killing scenes caught me [b]shouting[/b] because I was so damn sure about my move. It also points out the basic rules for chess. The basic movements of all figures (besides the King) are at least explained. Walking among them is not quite the idea of chess. But getting familiar with the attacking fields of each figure can help newcomers to understand chess. The story is heartbreaking. Don't be fooled by the pictures. This game is a chess-braintwister with at least two different story-endings.

This is a hidden gem that I just stumbled upon. It's short and sweet - I've completed one playthrough and unlocked one ending. The art is what captured me - it's fantastic. And for a short game, there are a ton of characters, all with really beautiful artwork. The gameplay is simple. Navigate your way through increasingly difficult chess grids. Don't step on any squares that an enemy piece can move into, or you're toast! I found myself extremely engaged and challenged throughout the whole experience. ☑ Amazing art ☑ Sweet music ☑ Very challenging ☑ Unique puzzle solving ☒ Doesn't seem to be any controller support - would be brilliant for this kind of title! H I G H L Y R E C O M M E N D E D

ShyChess is another one of those shovelware games where I'd probably give a "meh" rating if Steam gave that option, because it MOSTLY delivers on its $2.00 promise. But having gone through it, I just can't hit that thumbs up button. The base game, for the most part, is fine. ShyChess has 64 rooms with chessboard floors (most of which are NOT standard 8x8 chessboard size), with some pieces scattered about. Pieces don't move, so you need to navigate across the board, moving like a "one step at a time" rook (so only up, down, left or right; no moving diagonally) without getting killed. Squares that a white piece can take, or that no piece can take, are safe - but squares that a black piece can take (and aren't "protected" by a white piece being able to take) will result in your ShyGirl dying a quick (and illustrated) death. The game is actually quite easy if you take the time to meticulously map out the pieces and the safe/neutral/death squares on graph paper (or, since I'm a nerd, an Excel sheet), but still satisfying to solve. Lives are earned fairly easily as well, so mistakes aren't overly punishing. But from here, a few things quickly detract from the experience: - The game has a needlessly mature overlying story that has no real context around it, so it makes little sense, and along the way the background history of the ShyGirls is shown as cutscenes every 10 levels. These scenes are rife with grammatical errors. Fortunately they are all skippable, and if this was the only flaw, I would have given the game a "recommended, but only with the additional recommendation of skipping all the cutscenes". - That said, if you're interested in the game because of the sexual content and/or gore tags, neither is significant. Enough that this shouldn't be played by kids, but not enough to sell the game as such. The major sexual content is contained within the cutscenes and is therefore skippable, while the gore comes from the picture that comes up when you make a mistake and a black piece kills your ShyGirl - there is one portrait per type of piece. And the screenshot function is broken (it is remapped as soft reset) and dialogue screens can't be hidden, so none of that art can be easily saved or cleanly viewed. - The game has at least one error - on [spoiler]level 50[/spoiler] there is a square [spoiler](second row, third column, "C2" in Excel speak)[/spoiler] that should not be considered safe, as it can be taken by [spoiler]a distant black bishop[/spoiler] and has no white piece protecting it, but the only way to move through the level is to step on that square - which doesn't end up killing you. So it isn't game breaking, but it is sloppy design. Here's a link to a screenshot: https://twitter.com/RagnCharran/status/1048615275514363905 - Some levels are so large they cannot be seen all on the screen at once, and while I don't think there was ever a time a square could be influenced by a piece that couldn't be seen just before moving onto it, it made trying to map out the levels very annoying. Not frustrating, not difficult...but annoying. - The final level adds an extremely frustrating new mechanic to the game, which is grossly amplified by the "cannot see the whole room" problem above. It's doable, and you get infinite lives for that room...but it's still absolute bullshit. I almost didn't bother. - The extra endings are really just a chore. I find it difficult to imagine any of the three "non-optimal" endings would ever be found naturally. [Spoiler]The ending you get is dependent on how many ShyGirls make it out alive, and if you're careful and capable enough to make it through the massive final levels at all, you're going to make it with all the girls alive. Seeing the extra endings then just means deliberately killing set numbers of girls off before clearing stage 63.[/Spoiler] So if you can tolerate (or, as I suggest, skip) the weird and gramatically messed up story, don't mind the bloody death portraits, and can forgive at least one error in the game, then yeah, I guess it's worth $2.00. But I can't recommend it, and it in no way makes me interested in the Shygirls game "Erinye" that it is supposed to be a backgrounder for. Meh.

TL;DR: A fairly decent game for its price, but not if you are expecting sex- or gore-focused content. Pros.: - decent graphics overall - solid mechanics, no bugs found - decent story : mechanic pacing Cons.: - writing could use proof-reading - portraits are fairly monotonous, the characters' faces all appear identical with different coloured hair etc. - some of the late game puzzles are mind-numbingly difficult, and feels almost impossible to do without pen and paper - story is fairly bland/predictable, and preciously little of it actually exists in game. Biggest problem(s) IMO: I bought this game knowing nothing about its authour and any related franchise, and was hoping for an hour or so of sex- or gore-focused content, which is [i]not[/i] what I got. Part of it was my own fault in buying it based on its sex and gore tags alone, and maybe part of it was the false expectations set by the promotion art. That said, this would have been acceptable if the story-wise content was sufficiently good in relation to the unexpectedly large time-investment devoted for the mechanical gameplay--an aspect the game which I had always felt like an afterthought rather than a core mechanic. Final suggestions for a sequel or remake: - work on the writing--both content and style - properly incorporate mechanic as a more central part of the gameplay--make it relevant to the story, or make it less time-consuming - a post-game content section--such as a gallery--would be nice, especially if the dev. is thinking about commissioning artists for the game, or do so more substantially rather than relying on automatic character-generator. - market the game appropriately according to its content--if the ad.s make it seem like a sex-game, deliver on the sex, and vice versa.

There are people saying this is too hard or unpredictable? If you have any trouble at all, or just want a perfect score, all you need is a piece of graph paper to map the level. All pieces move exactly as chess pieces normally move. Excellent puzzles. I died a few times, but only used a map for the last few puzzles because they got really long, and going back to start was frustrating.