OBLAKO ☁️

My instinct with micro-priced indie puzzles is to expect filler, and OBLAKO made me rethink that reflex a little. Developed solo by Lola Fisher under the My Way Games banner, it lands in a very specific lane: the block-clearing casual, somewhere in the neighbourhood of old Flash arcade games, but dressed up in hand-drawn 2D art and wrapped in a soothing soundtrack that feels genuinely considered rather than licensed-and-forgotten. The word "oblako" is Russian for "cloud", and that floating, weightless feeling is clearly the design intention from the first level onward. The core loop is modest. Every stage gives you a grid of blocks with varying health points, and your goal is to clear a path to the indestructible heart block at the centre. Standard blocks chip away with repeated hits, but the dark purple domino blocks are the spanner in the works: they only respond to special crystals you collect mid-level, which adds a small layer of resource awareness to what is otherwise a gentle click-and-clear rhythm. The domino mechanic is the closest thing to a strategic wrinkle here, and while it never escalates into anything demanding, it does prevent the experience from going completely on autopilot. There is also a low-key narrative thread running through the levels, two characters trying to reach each other, which the art communicates through visual storytelling rather than text. It is slight, but it is sweet. Where OBLAKO earns its keep is in the craft details that a bigger studio would have spent a paragraph boasting about. The hand-drawn visuals are genuinely charming, with a cartoony palette that reads as intentionally warm rather than cheaply bright. The LGBTQ+ community tag on the Steam page is a quiet but meaningful signal about what kind of love story this is. The soundtrack does what a puzzle game soundtrack should do: it sits behind the action without demanding attention, calibrated to help you decompress rather than to excite. Solo developers live and die by those choices, and Fisher gets them right. The honest caveats: this is a very short experience aimed squarely at casual players. If you need mechanical depth, progressive difficulty, or a sense that a session will last an evening, OBLAKO is not your game. The block-clearing formula does not evolve dramatically across its level count, and players used to puzzlers with genuine aha-moments will find the challenge curve flat. Think of it less as a puzzle game in the demanding sense and more as an interactive doodle with a heartbeat. The right framing for it is a lunch-break game, or something you open when you need fifteen minutes of zero-stress engagement.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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