WarioWare for the Soul - Kuukiyomi Review
I was an awkward kid. I mean, heck, I’m still awkward now as I’m approaching middle age. But I have all sorts of foggy memories of growing up and encountering scenarios where I completely failed to comprehend what the “right” thing to do was. When everyone stood and clapped at the end of a performance, I was always the last one to figure it out and join in. When my family received bad news, my first instinct was always to crack a joke. Put another way, I was disastrously bad at reading the room.
If only Kuukiyomi had existed back then. This strange little title is a collection of super-fast, five-to–fifteen-second minigames in the style of Nintendo’s chaotic WarioWare series. The difference is that in Kuukiyomi, these minigames are all intended to test your ability to quickly read the situation and react in the appropriate way. It’s basically half-game, half-how to manual for social cues.
In full, Kuukiyomi features just over a hundred different minigames, although several of them are variations on a theme. In each of these games, other people will be represented by black-and-white, sketched-out, low-detail figures, while your character (or sometimes multiple characters, or sometimes an item in the scene) will stand out in stark red. Your goal is to quickly determine what you need to do and then act.
Before I get any further into details, I want to give a few examples, because Kuukiyomi is such an odd, singular game that it can be difficult to understand what exactly you’re meant to do. One common situation is a scene where you’re sitting on the seat on a bus, with one empty space between you and the next person on your right, and multiple empty seats on your left. A group of three new passengers walks on, and they’re clearly together. The “correct” answer here is to slide over so that this group can all be seated together.
That’s a pretty normal example, but things get much weirder. In one minigame, you’re a child awake in bed on Christmas evening, and Santa enters the room. You can choose to either ruin the holiday by staying up and staring at Ol’ Saint Nick, or you can close your eyes and at least pretend to be asleep for the big guy. Or let’s say you’re going on a date, but your love interest happens to be a young woman with the head of a cow. Do you take your date to the beef steak restaurant and ask her to engage in what would appear to be cannibalism, or do you opt for sushi?
The more outrageous the scenarios get, the harder I found it to be entirely certain what Kuukiyomi was asking of me. In one situation, I was a Godzilla-esque kaiju floating in space above two planets. One had a giant sign that said “No hero” and the other had a giant sign that said “Hero exists.” I got to choose which planet to go to, and I picked the “Hero exists” planet thinking that it was kinder to give the planet a fighting chance, but I cannot say for certain that it was the correct choice.
Part of the reason Kuukiyomi is so hard to pin down is that it doesn’t provide a ton of feedback. Sometimes minigames would end with a light bell ring that I assumed meant I had done the right thing, and sometimes they would end with a game-show-style buzzer noise that I assumed meant I did things wrong. Occasionally a screen would pop up telling me I was “so nice” or giving an admonishing, “What are you doing...” Most of the time, though, I was just shuffled along to the next game with no idea of how I did. The game doesn’t give you explicit answers by design; after all, you’re meant to be reading the situation on your own.
While I respect the artistic intent of this choice, I was frustrated at times at the lengths Kuukiyomi goes to in order to not tell the player anything. I more or less understand not giving out an objective, but you’re also never told what options you have for interacting with any given scene. Most of the minigames just require simple taps or slides that are relatively easy to figure out—sliding your character to the left has him scooch over on the bus seat, sliding down has your character duck under a projector and thus not block out the words, and so on. But I ran into multiple minigames where I had no idea what the game would even allow me to do, much less what it wanted me to do. I often ended up just clicking and sliding around at random until my character did something, and it usually wasn’t the "right" something.
Then again, it’s hard to get too annoyed when the game is so bonkers and when even the longest mini-game is over in thirty seconds or less. After you play through a hundred of Kuukiyomi’s challenges, the game will reward you with a bizarrely intense ending scene with dialogue tweaked based off your performance, and then a ranking of six different factors: competitiveness, kindness, sociability, responsibility, wit, and practical ability. It will also provide you with a “class” based off your ranking. My first playthrough I was awarded the title of ninja, and in my second I was told I would make a great TV or radio writer. I’ll take it, I guess!
Blasting through a full session of Kuukiyomi should take less than an hour, but be warned that there’s not a ton of reasons to return to the game. There are two game modes, and you can unlock the ability to play individual minigames for practice, but that’s about it as far as actual content is concerned. Then again, this is a cheap game. You can play it totally free with ads, or you can buy an ad-free version with all the bonuses unlocked from the start for a reasonable $0.99.
So do I feel a little less aloof after playing Kuukiyomi? Have I finally been properly trained in the delicate art of reading the room? Eh, not really. But Kuukiyomi does present a truly unique game with a unique goal, and that alone makes it worth spending a couple hours messing around with. It’s memorable enough that I’m hoping the game’s two sequels (currently available on Steam and Nintendo Switch) make it to mobile platforms in the future.
SCORE: 3 OUT OF 5 STARS
PLAY IF YOU LIKE:
• The Warioware series. It’s wild that the WarioWare games have been around for almost two decades now, and so few other titles have managed to capture the manic, off-the-wall energy of these great Nintendo micro-game collections. Kuukiyomi is almost certainly the closest of anything I’ve played to bottling up a little bit of that WarioWare magic.
• Ruminating on every little embarrassing mistake you’ve made in social situations. With its Japanese origins, Kuukiyomi has a lot of scenarios that won’t be totally recognizable by an audience elsewhere around the world. But there’s enough familiarity here that, if you’re like me, you’ll be reminded of times when you screwed up reading the social cues and ended up completely embarrassed. Then you can stay up all night running those memories over and over again in your head and wondering how you even made it to adulthood with your lack of grace and refinement. Enjoy it!
💬 If you’ve played Kuukiyomi, let us know what you think in the comments! If not, share your most embarrassing memory of misreading a social situation. We promise not to judge! This is a safe space for people who don’t understand how to do things right.
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