Makibishi: Annoyingly Addictive & Completely Weird Browser Game

THIS ONE IS going to be a little hard to explain. It all started with my stumbling across a site called “Makibishi Comic“, which turned out to be some sort of online Flash based point-and-click adventure from one of those insane Manga-esque Japanese software houses. This isn’t the first Japanese browser game I’ve featured here at the site, but it’s certainly the weirdest.

A cursory look at the site and you really have no idea what it’s all about, even when you select the English version. Pretty quickly it becomes obvious that this is one of those simple point and click style affairs, where you advance through various quests from screen to screen, but within about 5 minutes of playing this little gem you begin to realise just how different this thing is. In fact – I’m betting you haven’t seen anything like this before, I know I hadn’t. The general objective of the game is to solve a series of clues/puzzles in order to locate five missing people, each search representing a different screen or area within the game.

So – what’s all the fuss about then?

Well – although pointing and clicking is the ‘method’ of advancing in this game, it’s the crazy clues, mad interaction with things and enforced lateral thinking which makes this stand out from the crowd. Initially you will be pissed off that you can’t quite understand what the game is telling you to do. Clues aren’t obvious; but trust me, the answer is always there on the screen. Frustration will lead eventually to outright anger at times and just as you are about to kill your browser session and move on you will remember what I said above – it’s about lateral thinking, not just clicking – and that’s when this game becomes truely unique. Every single time I thought I’d hit a dead end, I just needed to think differently in order to solve things.

The reward for figuring out the clues and the sequences is to advance to the next screen, which in itself is not particularly exciting. However the intrinsic reward of figuring out the nefarious and downright nasty clues, well that’s just hard to describe. It will drive you mad trying to figure out what’s going on, but trust me on this – try it for a while and I’m betting you will get hooked. 

Let me know how you get on with this… I’d be curious how you fared out in the logic/puzzles.