Shutter Nyan is a puzzle-platformer about a cat with a camera who wants to cheer up its owner.  The game has a simple, mostly black and white artstyle with splashes of color, namely when it comes to the objects that you can photograph.  Certain objects can be photographed and then duplicated anywhere you want in order to make platforms, and your goal is to complete a picture of how our kitty protagonist met its owner.  The problem is, this picture is missing certain elements, like the girl’s rain boots and umbrella, so you must seek out these objects, take photos of them, and then place the photos in the picture to fill in the gaps.

While the game is quite cute and the concept is certainly a unique one, I didn’t find Shutter Nyan’s gameplay to be particularly compelling.  Although being able to place your own platforms based off of photos you took is neat, the demo’s gameplay still didn’t progress beyond basic actions like placing a platform over this gap or sticking a platform up here to avoid the rain dripping down.  And if you take damage, you lose one photo, and if you die completely, you lose every photo you took!  This, paired with a great misunderstanding on my part, led me to quit the demo early, something I rarely do.

I’m not sure how many sections the demo has, but I attempted two of them.  In the first one, we needed a picture of a cardboard box, which was pretty easy to obtain.  Next, we needed a photo of the girl’s missing rain boots.  So I headed into the second level, where I was informed that I needed the brown boots specifically.  So I took a photo of the specified boots, but as I attempted to exit the stage, whether it be from falling rain droplets or spikes or from falling to my doom (or from accidentally placing the wrong photo instead of one of a platform), I would repeatedly lose the photo of the brown boots.  After having to retake the photo multiple times, only to inevitably lose it, I finally gave up!

Well, as I was editing my recorded gameplay for Youtube, I was reminded of a vital detail that would have made the game way less frustrating.  It would appear that you can lock important photos with Y so that you don’t lose them.  Unfortunately, when the game originally told me about this feature, I had no idea what it was telling me to do.

Although this particular complaint was completely my own fault, even if I had played the game properly and not ignored a very important detail, I’m still not convinced that Shutter Nyan would be a very fun game.  (I’ll also use this moment to admit that I’m not even certain what the game’s actual name is, as I’ve seen both Shutter Nyan and Nyang online.)  If you’re interested in games that allow you to place the platforms to your liking, I’d much sooner recommend Pompom: The Great Space Rescue, a really cute game where you must use platforms, umbrellas (for floating), lanterns (for warding off ghosts), and many other things to get the hamster to the goal.  Whether or not Shutter Nyan gets better after the demo remains undecided, as I couldn’t find much more info about the game online, and I’m certainly not paying $14.99 to find out.