Yashik

My first impression of Yashik was that KGourmet had a genuinely interesting kernel of an idea buried under very rough execution. The core loop asks you to navigate a small character through closed rooms, hunting for a keycard and the exit door, but the twist is that you build your own path rather than find one. You press F to summon a platform from a limited supply, and the three platform types each do something distinct: the orange one launches you upward like a bounce pad, the yellow one slides you horizontally, and the green one holds you in place above a gap. On paper that is a resourceful little system, the kind of scarcity mechanic that can produce elegant moments when a puzzle is designed to exploit all three types at once. In practice, the design does not fully commit to that potential. The levels are short and, for the most part, solvable by instinct rather than careful planning. Dedicated players in the Steam community have noted that all 35 levels can be completed in around ten minutes total, which gives you a sense of scope. That is not automatically a condemnation - some small games know exactly how much they want to say - but Yashik never quite earns such brevity because the difficulty does not build meaningfully. You rarely feel the satisfying click of a tricky room finally giving way. You simply finish it and move to the next one before the rules have had time to deepen. There is also a technical wrinkle that the community has flagged more than once: hit detection on the platforms can behave unreliably, with blocks sometimes failing to register contact correctly. For a game where precise placement and timing are the entire point, inconsistent collision feedback is a real frustration and one that does not appear to have been addressed since release. The controls themselves are straightforward - WASD to move, W to jump, F to place, R to restart - but the unreliable hitboxes undercut what should be the most tactile part of the experience. Where I will give KGourmet some credit is in scope honesty. This is a small solo-dev experiment that does not pretend to be something larger. The achievement list is 35 items long, one per level, which at least gives completionists a clean structure to follow, and community guides exist if you get stuck. NedoStudio went on to release other puzzle-platformers after Yashik, including Gelu and Freezeer, and you can feel this title functioning as a proof-of-concept for ideas that were later refined. That context makes it interesting as a developer footnote, but it does not make it the strongest use of your limited gaming hours. If you are drawn to micro-indie puzzle platformers with a resource management twist, Yashik carries the seed of something worth experiencing, especially if the price is negligible. Just lower your expectations for depth, polish, and longevity. The platform-creation idea has a quiet charm to it, and I find myself wishing someone had given it another six months of level design.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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