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Mostly, Tengami seems to fail to understand itself. It’s ugly, and a woefully clear indication that little effort has been made to move this from touch-screen-based interfaces.

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(Even with “Hints” to off in the options leaves these imagination-removing circles in the game.) This isn’t helped by two and a half years having not proved long enough to add an in-game cursor, instead leaving you with your native Windows pointer, flitted about the screen and turning to a hyperlink hand when you can interact. Where popping up is required, the game fails to conceive a way to communicate these possibilities without bloody great pulsating circles all over the screen, leaving you with the gaming choice of clicking where it tells you to, or walking off and making coffee. Paths can be created by folding down sections of stairways to adjust levels, mixing and matching until you can make progress. The few puzzles that do use the pop-up formula show how nicely it could have worked. Solutions that do not embrace the pop-up creation at all. Or it just descends to rotating circles or counting symbols. Get a missing piece of a glyph by pulling tabs to raise and lower the water level in a well. Put some wolves to sleep by tinkling wind chimes, by pulling at tabs. Where every other puzzle adventure might have levers to pull, Tengami has tabs to pull. Sadly, it seems that it is my brain thinking of these ideas, as the game opts for primarily generic puzzling that mostly ignores the format. And given the concept, my brain immediately fizzled with the potential of unique puzzles presented by the format, where turning pages, pulling tabs and manipulating scenery could allow you to amend the environment to complete challenges. Presented as an impossible pop-up book, you move a paper character through pretty scenery, with nebulous aims of reaching glowy lights, and an ultimate goal of collecting flowers to rejuvenate a sad-looking wintry tree.

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(Although there are flaws with the PC port.) The biggest issue here is this is a game that never figured out how to be itself. The key flaws aren’t with the PC port, however.

I’m not even vaguely sure what was done to the game, beyond perhaps improving resolutions, since. A hefty two and a half years on, our wish is finally granted, and Tengami has made its way onto Steam. The Indicade nominated puzzle adventure is immediately eye-catching, thanks to its Japanese pop-up book design, and took naturally to the iPad’s smooth-screened finger-tapping home. But I wanted more: more depth, more interaction, more complexity a hero's journey with more at stake than flowers.Since 2012 we’ve been keen to see Tengami on PC. I can understand it as a slow game played to relax, a complete thing to be enjoyed and absorbed the same way you might watch a film on a weekend. I can see it as a meditative experience, in which the puzzles are rewarding tests of patience and mindfulness for the player. I don't think everyone will feel this way about Tengami, at all. The minimalist environments start to feel sparse and unpopulated. But after a while, the deliberate steps start to feel slow.

As the game begins, I can feel my breathing slow and my world narrow into this calm little measured space, the character's deliberate steps, the sounds and the gorgeous colours of the game helping to pull me in. It's trying for a calm, meditative state, a variation on a Saturday morning sort of 'lying on the sofa with a cup of tea not doing anything very much' feeling. There's a specific mood that Tengami is trying to create in its players, I suspect, and it's not one I'm good at sustaining.

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When I realise I must solve a code that is going to involve a significant amount of backtracking, I decide to go do something else for a while. I find myself double tapping on the screen to walk through a (beautiful, but minimal) area for the third time and then having to stop myself from playing Threes on my phone while the walking animation plays. I find myself sighing with mild disappointment at the third instance of the same puzzle mechanic. It suffers from some of the same constraints as a real pop-up book: the interactions are generally obvious and limited in scope. I don't want to dislike Tengami, because it is so beautiful to look at and to listen to, because it is crafted with so much delicacy and love, and because it ought to be so restful to play.

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