Ratings and Reviews by Joey Jones

There is quite a lot to like about the game: it's very well implemented, a great premise, challenging but fair and well hinted puzzles... and yet! I found it's cruelty a bit much. I regularly had to reload saves after finding myself in an unwinnable situation— in at least one case, well after making the fateful decision (if you read the clubfloyd transcript, they never finished the game hitting the same snag as I did). My advice to players is (Spoiler - click to show)don't buy anything until you've got a bank account, and you will need to use each of the sellable items exactly once. Reloading wouldn't be such a big deal but there are tedious sequences (Spoiler - click to show)such as portaging the jugs, or remembering to get on the platform before pushing the button that were a chore to repeat repeatedly. Approached from a more old school mindset, I'm sure that the game as a whole is more forgiving than older Infocom stuff, but from where I'm standing I didn't think my play-time to enjoyment ratio was always as high as I'd ideally like it to be.

It's a rare game where after slogging around a lot in the middle, I had a great time in the final sequences which involve more drastic timeline change and changing lives. Nevertheless, I felt the low-stakes conceit (you're just trying to get into your house...) was a bit of a wasted opportunity, though I recognise it's a genre norm. People compare the game to Day of the Tentacle, but in that game there's much more of a plot with villains, a stronger over-arching goal, many distinct characters etc. The writing, while elevated and atmospheric in places (Spoiler - click to show)(I especially enjoyed exploring the house when it was wrecked), is primarily functional. The protagonist is a blank slate, and there are only perhaps only two who are more fleshed out— though this is somewhat made up by having good development of those two characters.

So 5 stars for being an inventive, robustly implemented long game with fair puzzles, but dock 1 for making me replay the whole first third of the game, and dock another 1 for the underdeveloped setting/characterisation. Still, I very much recommend it overall for fans of long puzzle-centric games with a distinct core mechanic.

This game is very buggy and at least some of the room descriptions were written using ChatGPT. Still, it's a very characterful romp invoking a specific time and place and kind of social scene, and for all its many rough edges in implementation, the game is not hard to interact with and have an amusing experience.

This game has an interesting relationship to mimesis. It’s very much a game of two halves. The first part is a puzzleless tutorial about following cultural rules; the second part is a series of puzzles with little cultural rule following (other than observing the priest’s ritual).

In the initial tutorial section at the inn, the player’s action is entirely dictated by what is culturally expected of the samurai character. For example, the player must take off their shoes before entering the inn. The game throughout is richly researched, though written very much in an edutainment register.

In the second half, the player does three of what Roger S. G. Soralla, in his seminal essay “Crimes Against Mimesis”, called “Puzzles Out of Context”. The player has to solve a logic grid puzzle, a Nurikabe puzzle, and a maze with room names all alike (this isn’t a spoiler, the game’s main page explicitly warns you that these are coming). To Garry Francis’s credit, all three puzzles are somewhat embedded in their setting, though their presentation in each case quite literally takes you out of the game. In the two logic puzzles, you go away from the game and fuss about in an abstract grid and then go back to the game and enact the solution; in the maze, you’re encouraged to make a map. Map making is a time-honoured adventure game tradition, and one of the game’s goals is to teach players somewhat to play adventure games, so I can’t really begrudge this one. However, the overall effect is to repeatedly step out of the story and think as-a-player, rather than as-the-character. And this is in sharp contrast to the initial, more setting-grounded, section.

In the second half, the social rules have mostly been forgotten about, the player needn’t remove their shoes before entering any of the huts (though perhaps those rules don’t apply to commoners).

There are a lot of period-appropriate details in The Samurai and the Kappa, and the game invests the most detail on three of them: the specificities of the strange myth of the Kappa, Kami temple rituals, and inn-based child prostitution. The first two are intertwined with the game’s puzzles and plot and make the game a distinct experience. The third is a period detail that the author was especially interested in exploring but has no impact on the plot or puzzles, though maybe we can say that it is used as a way to teach new players how to use the parser.

Both halves have their merit, but tonally they make for an unbalanced experience.