Recent reviews by Akami

A Short Hike feels like a warm hug. It is a simple game that reminds you of simpler times.


There are so many faces to meet and characters to help, with so many different things to share with you. Saying "stories" feels too shallow, because these characters feel like real people. Many of them made me laugh and were very kind, but many of them also made me ache and sympathize. They have real struggles, struggles I myself relate to, and as Claire I was able to help and support them.

But Claire also struggles. From the start, when talking to Aunt May, it’s clear Claire is anxious about a phone call she’s awaiting. Aunt May suggests she hikes up to Hawk Peak, both to get reception to her phones but most of all to take her mind off of things. And thus, both Claire and the player start exploring. And soon enough, the awaited phone call is fully forgotten. The anxiety has been replaced by a sense of calm, curiosity and joy. Both for Claire, and the player.

This game allowed me, as Claire, to help characters I met in the world. But the characters in this world, through helping Claire, also helped me. They made me feel calm, safe, included and appreciated. They made me appreciate the now of both their world and my own.

And I don't know about you, but I really enjoyed My (Short) Time as a carefree kid again.


Thank you for the hug adamgryu

what..? What?! WHAT!?! !


Sheepy is a simple enough looking game that, with its short playtime and free download, could easily fool you into thinking it’s a relaxed, cheap and unpolished game.
Nothing could be further from the truth.

With amazing animation, stunning art direction, ABSOLUTE BANGER of a soundtrack (which is the only thing they’ll let you pay for) and soft worldbuilding, Sheepy is able to maximize its short playtime. The thing I want to give the most praise for in Sheepy is its soundtrack. More specifically how it has excellently woven the music into the action of the game, heightening every sensation through the game. It is ridiculous how epic the last parts of this game felt.

There are twists, there are turns, there are things that made me go “what..? What?! WHAT!?!”. And with a grin on my face I found myself headbanging along to the music as I went where the game took me.



Again, this game is completely free. If you have an hour to spend, play this gem.

Hope to see more from this developer in the future.

In short: This game is what happens when you try to make Journey into an MMO but you only care about making Money™.

Don't waste your time.



In long: I was really disappointed by this game.

I absolutely loved both Flower and Journey and remember them both fondly. The first time I was swept away by Flower's breeze, and the first time I got to ascend Journey's mountain, were truly amazing moments that evoked more emotion than I think anyone who's played these games expected. Both games are driven by you and your own curiosity to explore the world around you. There are no quests, no explicit story, no UI and barely any information on how to play. Much like experiencing a sunset, these games become special because you make them so. Sure, we’ve all seen sunsets before. But when you invest your mind, heart and maybe even soul into them, they can become a truly unique and wondrous experience.
And since games inherently need you, the player, to ever actually be played, you almost always have an opportunity to shape your own experience of any given game.

But what if you shared that experience with someone?

TGC's Journey made the single player experience of Flower into a shared experience by letting two players traverse the world together. Between exploring ruins, solving puzzles, attempting communication and helping each other through the game's challenges, most of the people I know who've played this game, if not everyone, have expressed aww over the magical moment of meeting another player. The realization you're not alone, the charming communication, the way you somehow become friends and the moment you realize the journey has come to an end. It is a strange feeling of genuine connection with a person you know nothing about, and yet share this unique experience with. One could say it transcends the game itself.
I don't think it's an understatement to say Journey made its mark in gaming history with the way it implemented multiplayer. It did a lot of other things right, but in my opinion it is the fact that you share (a) Journey together with someone that makes it into the wondrous experience that it is.


So with all this in mind, with these games in the bank, I thought TGC's Sky would deliver on that same kind of experience. Actually, I thought Sky would be a grander experience. That's at least what the ads were trying to sell me. But the experience I had was a much more tragic one.

The game starts with a fantastic, silent introductory scene followed by... text. Instructions. And the instructions never stop. At every new point of interest I found in this game, the game would always tell me what to do before I had a chance to explore it myself. Even in the beautiful cutscenes, where ancient looking cave paintings slowly appears, telling a clear visual story, Instructions come in "explaining" everything. It is the gaming equivalent of exposition in movies. It removes your curiosity to explore the game, because it removes you from the game, and instead just turns into tasks to complete as the game demands.

After the first scene is over we of course immediately hear from Instructions again: We have an inner flame and need to save everyone. Cool.
So we light a candle with our inner flame and start burning away "evil" from a statue, of course only after Instructions told us as much. When the last "evil" is burned away the statue breaks and releases the trapped spirit of a child. After a brief cutscene we take the childs’ hand as they lead us into what looks to be a tiny village where we rescue another spirit, this time it looks to be an adult, and help them burn away more "evil" from their house. In return for restoring their house they offer us their services! Which aaare... hairstyles. You get to change the hairstyle of your character. And there are almost 50 different hairstyles in total, but you can only choose a handful of them. You know why? Because hairstyles are one of the game's cosmetics. This is seriously within the first 10 minutes of this game! And the game has already made us look at freaking cosmetic hairstyles.
The microtransactions in this game are insane. Not only is almost every part of your character's outfit customizable, you also get an apartment in the village for some reason? And that apartment needs furniture! And here are some musical instruments you need to buy to use! And a seasonal pass because we all looove the money the players so much! And all of this either costs an absurd amount of real money or it costs candles, and in game currency, that you can either slowly grind for or just pay real money. But screw all that! It's just cosmetics, it's truly nothing I need to experience this game, right? Right...?

Before I leave the village, I find and connect with several other players (because there are several here). Connecting with players shows me that I can pay a candle to engage with them in new ways. Like hug them! If I pay more candles, I can high five them! And if I pay eeeven more, I could even get to.. chat with them! But in order to do ANY of this I have to spend candles to upgrade my relationship to a chosen player. One player.
Sky has marketed itself as an MMO, yet I’ve never played an MMO where the requirement for being able to use the chat function was either grind or pay up. The game even tries to give you FOMO by showing the speech bubbles of people chatting but scrambling the words. Absolutely ridiculous!

So we leave the village and start exploring the world and solving puzzles, finally! Except, this is where it all falls apart.

I just completed one out of the three puzzles, but the end-of-level cutscene is already playing? And it's interrupting the cutscene I got from rescuing another spirit? So now the camera is flying back and forth, the music doesn't know what and when it's supposed to play, and the level is just done? This happens because other players have already completed the required puzzles to move on from this level. I don't get to do the puzzles and I have no idea who solved them. In Journey you always knew that it was your one-and-only partner that was helping you out, but in Sky it can be literally anyone. Worse yet, sometimes you have players, who've already completed the game, going around and rushing puzzles because they just want to get from point A to B. There is no sense of teamwork, no way of opting out and it completely destroys the pacing of the game.

Apart from that there were a bunch of smaller things chipping away at my experience. Every new spirit I saved, apart from giving you one emote, would just be another cosmetic pipeline to spend money on. The level design made it very clear with locked doorways that you were meant to backtrack when able. The “friends” I made along the way, and spent my candles on, disappeared without a way for me to contact them. And after completing a few levels of this the bad was outweighing the good and I found myself longing for other games. Not only for the experiences of Journey and Flower, but for the proper MMO that actually felt fun to progress through.


With not even 2h played, I put down this game and picked up an MMO, and after writing this review I’ll be picking Flower back up again. There were things I enjoyed about this game, sure, but I won't spend time explaining them since they do not amend my stance that this is a soulless cash grab of a game from a company that no longer cares about what they deliver to their players, only how much money they can make off of them. Off of you. And with microtransaction-distractions around every corner, one thing became very clear:


This is not an experience. This is a video game.



Don't waste your time. Go experience a sunset.

Very fun throughout the first game, but once you realize it's just the same game thrice over, it gets rather repetetive and boring. Some mechanics also aged really poorly, and were seemingly not patched at all, leading to some very frustrating moments. I found myself enjoying the game less the more it went on and in the end it was more like a chore to play it: easy to do, difficult to enjoy.

There are positives not surrounding the mechanics, like the absolutely gorgeous artstyle that is both charming and clean. Alas, in the end it's all brought down by janky controls and repetitive gameplay.

Only recommended for the ones with nostalgia.

Short and charming. Very enjoyable, especially with a friend/partner.

Very weird and intriguing. Incredibly atmospheric with exceptional sound and visuals. The eye for detail is amazing, I really recommend exploring if you think you see anything worthwhile, it often is! The gameplay felt very similar to how Limbo played yet now it feels slightly more refined where Limbo would be a bit clunky. It is a very simple game to play, and with that it challenges your mind even more, not only with puzzles. It's also equally creepy, if not more disturbing, as Limbo was.

Very easy and enjoyable to 100% as well. I followed a Steam guide to know which maps certain achievements where on but searched, found and solved the puzzles myself.

The only rougelike/rougelite I've stuck with all throughout the game.

Amazing graphics, effects and artstyle. Fully voiceacted with several intriguing characters and stories. Really nice gameplay that feels great to master. I literally have nothing bad to say.

Could recommend for anyone!

Highly recommend for anyone who loved the grey-zone, morale-bending quests and questions you faced in TW3, and even more so the RPG players who don't fancy hack-n-slash (or real time combat at all) and just want a wonderful story to card-fight your way through!

The artstyle is beautiful throughout. From the overworld you walk in to the in game maps, as well as the dialogues and cutscenes.
The music is just what you'd expect from a witcher game, but the added ambient sounds you hear all throughout the game is what sells every single mood for me. Walking past a town? 'Course you hear the townsfolk. There's a marriageparty going on in town? Groove along to the music! Someone burned down the town? Welp, at least you'll hear the very ambient flames!
Did I mention the entire game i voiced? Every single card? So long as you count the sound of a catapult shooting off as a voice that is...

The story is fulfilling in and of itself, but the additions made from the companions you (maybe) get on the way, as well as letters you read, townsfolk you talk to and any other means of gathering information really adds to the experience. But still! None of it's needed to carry out a story that is comprehensible and satisfying.
And of course, your choices matter! Truly. For the bigger story, and some smaller ones.

It is a "sit back and relax" game, while still getting you fully tense around every corner!

So again, I highly recommend for anyone who's played TW3 (or earlier games), any RPG player, and possibly any gamer that wants to try something new for a change.

This is scratching a classic WoW/oldschool RPG-itch I didn't know I had.

My favourite thing about this game is just how realistic it is and how seriously I've started to take the world.
I find myself comparing it to Zelda: BOTW; A game made with a MUCH bigger team, from a MUCH bigger company and a MUCH bigger budget. This game manages to implement systems that makes the world feel real. From simple things, like if you're wet you can't sleep and that boats need the right angle of wind to move, to bigger things, like how fire smoke actually fills up under roofs or that a tree falling into another tree can start a chain reaction of falling trees (weather I intended to or not when chopping it down!)

This makes the world feel so very real to me. It makes me pause and look at my environment with a new perspective. I take it seriously because my actions have proven to have effect (and consequence). Instead of thinking about the games mechanics, the stats and number or the 1, 2, 3 requirements I need for this upgrade to be available, I start thinking and problem solving intuitively, basing it on what I see and experience. Something I rarely feel I can really do since many games are limited by their mechanics, making it easier to just think about them than the world presented to me.


There is so much more than can be said about this game. The charming, oldstyle graphics, the rewarding ability system, the building mechanics that manage to give enough freedom do build anything anywhere, while still allowing players to make exact measurements of their buildings. Many others have left great, indepth reviews that are really worth the read, I just wants to do my part in cherishing the developers and helping Valheim flourish.


The more I play, the more I fall in love with this game. This is sure to be one that I come back to play, long from now.

Thank you, Iron Gate, for this absolutely wonderful game! I simply can't wait to see the finished product.

Spark, spark på er utvecklare! Ni är grymt bra!

Best RPG I've played.
If you're like me then the base game will give you around 100h of gameplay, and with the two DLCs that'll bump you up to around 200.
Hella worth it if you're a roleplayer and a fantasy nerd.