Kamibako

Genre: Turn-Based JRPG / Management Simulation

Players: 1

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Review:

Kamibako, released in 2025 on PC, PlayStation 4, and Nintendo Switch and sometimes subtitled with Mythology of Cube, is a game that combines Turn-Based JRPG and Management Simulation elements, even fitting in some color-matching Puzzle elements as well, all in a game about restoring a land (in a very literal sense) beset by evil forces.

The above description may put some players in mind of classic games in the Actraiser series and Dark Cloud series, and Kamibako does indeed have some elements of those games, though it is wholly its own thing, and fairly unique.

On the surface level, this is a Turn-Based JRPG, with players taking the role of a Restorer, given a mission by the land’s goddess to purify areas of “fragmentation” spreading across the land like a virus, taking out violent monsters associated with the fragmentation, and ultimately tracking down the source of these problems. However, you technically won’t be doing the fighting yourself.

Instead you’ll be joined by comrades who will do the fighting for you, and you’ll direct them when to swap out their elemental-based weapons, and empower and direct the use of the characters’ special abilities. These abilities are charged by different-colored magic that builds over time, and on each turn you must choose one of the colors to draw from, encouraging players to mix up the abilities they use so they don’t drain all of one magic color and leave themselves unable to use it further.

Clearing fragmentation or drawing extra magic for your next battle requires playing a tile-shifting color-matching puzzle game, where you have a time or turn limit to remove a certain number of tiles, and can only remove contiguous tiles of the same color. This makes this puzzle very similar to the classic game SameGame (AKA Chain Shot), with a bit of Bejeweled mixed in. Not exactly thrilling stuff, but I suppose it adds a bit of variety to the gameplay.

Finally, these elements all act in service to the game’s Management Simulation elements, which provide players with some basic town-building tools to create their own towns within cleared areas. Towns even establishing their own trade system, with completed towns shipping goods based on the area they’re built in and the structures you chose to build. This is a clever gameplay mechanic that really helps to set this game apart within the RPG genre, but I feel like it’s a bit poorly-explained and confusing

The presentation in Kamibako is a bit of a mixed bag. On the one hand, the game’s 3D cel-shaded anime-style characters look nice and animate well enough. However, the game’s environments are boxy and grid-based in a way that looks really artificial and repetitive. These visuals are joined by decent-sounding Japanese-language voiced characters (in a story I highly doubt you’ll care about), and backed by a pretty generic-sounding fantasy RPG soundtrack.

In the end, I like Kamibako, and think this game takes some pretty big swings at some really unique gameplay elements, but those unique elements often do not work as well as they should. The RPG elements are clunky and overly-complicated, and just trying to equip new armor and weapons requires an absurd process of setting up camp outside of a town to access your characters’ equipment screen. The Management Simulation elements, as I mentioned, seem poorly-explained and confusing, and the Puzzle game elements are not very engaging. Overall, I do think Kamibako is still more than the sum of its parts, but it is definitely less successful than it could have been due to the problems each of those parts has.

tl;dr – Kamibako is a Turn-Based JRPG with some Management Simulation elements, and there are some color-matching Puzzle Game elements as well, all in a story about a “Restorer” sent by a goddess to purify “fragmentation” spreading across a land. There are some ambitious gameplay elements here, and a lot of variety, but while this game is trying to do a lot, everything it’s doing seems to have problems. While it’s still unique enough to be worth a look, it’s a shame that we couldn’t see what this game would have been with all of its problems addressed.

Grade: B-

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