Mewseum: Film Festival

Love this series! I appreciated that they adjusted from the first game to have the puzzle be grey scale as you are working on it. In the first game when a section would have 2 colours in it, it really threw me off. The cat art is so fun and well done. It's satisfying to see the completed art after completing the puzzles. I'm looking forward to the next game (I hope) in this series!

[h1]🐾 Purr-fect relaxation for film and cat lovers![/h1] [b]Experience & Atmosphere:[/b] I recently finished Mewseum: Film Festival and was pleasantly surprised after nearly 6.7 hours of playtime. If you're looking for relaxation and have a soft spot for cats, you'll definitely get your money's worth. It is a truly successful second installment in the series, and I'm already looking forward to the release of the next part. [b]Gameplay for Puzzle Fans:[/b] A must-have for Shikaku fans! Since the gameplay is based on logically dividing the grid into rectangles and squares, this digital implementation hits the nail on the head. It is the perfect version of the Nikoli classic. You work your way through the levels step by step to unlock beautifully designed movie posters in pixel-art style—all with a fluffy, feline twist, of course. [b]Scope & Feel-Good Factor:[/b] I especially enjoyed the relaxed atmosphere. There is no time pressure, making it easy to just switch off. While the playtime of just under 7 hours was very entertaining, I personally wouldn't have minded if it had been a bit longer. [b]Performance & Features:[/b] Thanks to practical features like the helpful hint functi…

[h2]Bigger posters, more puzzles, and a bold new philosophy that 80% is basically 100%.[/h2] Mewseum: Film Festival has done something increasingly rare in sequels: it kept the puzzle concept from the first game and resisted the urge to [i]verschlimmbessern[/i] it - that splendid German art of "improving" something until everyone quietly wishes you hadn't. The familiar Shikaku-style puzzling is still here, now used to uncover lovingly made cat-themed movie posters, and mechanically it remains as pleasant as before. Unfortunately, the posters are much larger this time and contain far more puzzles than the paintings in the original. This occasionally turns a relaxing little logic exercise into something closer to completing the annual tax return, except with more cats. Apparently the developers noticed this as well and arrived at an elegant solution: once you've completed about 80% of the areas, the game simply reveals the remaining 20%. Brilliant. Nothing says "satisfying puzzle completion" quite like the software eventually deciding, "Oh, never mind, I'll do the rest." I felt slightly cheated - albeit very efficiently. The classical music has also wandered off and been replaced …

I do recommend this and the previous game, Mewseum: Masterpieces. But this comes with both a caveat and criticism first. The caveat is that this game is Shikaku -- it's easy to find Shikaku to play for free online. I really hope the devs weren't dishonestly hoping to convince people they came up with this game. As such you don't need to go to either Mewseum game to get this itch scratched. Let's get the criticism out of the way: let me express my intense disappointment at the complete lack of "nya" in any of the movie title puns. It's BEGGING to be there. The Nyavengers, Mission Nyanpossible and so on, it just fits so easily. Not every space has to be weeb colonized, but this is a Japanese puzzle game to begin with. So let's give Japanese cats their due. Might I suggest a Nyakira poster as a compromise? Okay. All of that out of the way, I think both Mewseum games are worth playing and the most worthwhile way to experience Shikaku I'd seen. The music in both games are soothing, the interface and visuals and just everything about the UI feels good. It's the gaming equivalent of enjoying a nice cup of cafe au lait. Shikaku is also a very very satisfying and under-loved game -- it's …

Fun puzzle game where you have to figure where to draw lines or rectangles of a certain sizes. I like how they break down the areas into smaller pieces to make it easier to manage and gives good stopping points when you don't have a whole lot of time to play. Final movie posters were cute!

[i]Mewseum: Film Festival[/i] works in the same way as the previous game, [i]Mewseum: Masterpieces[/i], but features famous movie posters instead of well-known paintings. So if you liked [i]Masterpieces[/i], then you’ll most likely also enjoy [i]Film Festival[/i]. I think that movie posters are a good idea for a sequel to [i]Masterpieces[/i], but I personally still ended up preferring the paintings of [i]Masterpieces[/i]. That didn’t take away from the enjoyment of the game as it doesn’t affect the gameplay, and I’m looking forward to future installments of the series. One change which is somewhat disliked is that you don’t fill out the entire levels yourself anymore. Instead, whenever you finish a region of a level, an adjacent part of that level is also automatically filled out. From what I can tell, this allows the levels in [i]Film Festival[/i] to have a higher resolution than the ones in [i]Masterpieces[/i] without becoming grindy. But personally I’d have preferred to fill out the entire levels myself, even if it had taken longer.