Estiman

Genre: Puzzle / Educational

Players: 1

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Review:

(Note: This game was the winner of the April 2026 All-Patron Budget Vote! Become a donor on Patreon to join in on future polls like this one to decide games to review!)

Estiman is a Puzzle game with Educational elements released in 2016 on PC and ported in 2019 to Nintendo Switch. In this game, players are presented with a group of objects with different shapes or colors, and must select an object belonging to the most numerous group, and then repeat the process until the screen is cleared.

The presentation in this game is quite nice, with various unlockable visual styles for the objects you’re matching, ranging from geometric shapes to pulsating cell-like globs, each in front of a different abstract background, backed by New Agey-sounding music. It all works well enough, and the presentation is well beyond what I would expect for a game that sells for only $2.

As for the gameplay… well, I just described it above. Pick the type of object that’s most numerous, wash, rinse, repeat. It’s the sort of thing we’ve seen used countless time as a minigame in things like the Mario Party series, and it’s no less shallow here. As you progress, the objects get more numerous, but the gameplay remains the same.

Actually, there are some complaints I can make here. First, let’s start with the controls. The gamepad controls are frustrating, because when you move your selection it’s never quite clear which new shape you’ll be selecting, and since you’re racing against the clock, the rush to be speedy can make you make mistakes and select the wrong thing. The game thankfully works much better in handheld mode using touchscreen controls, but not everyone will be playing the game that way.

On the note of making mistakes, you lose the game if you make even just one mistake. You can thankfully continue by spending in-game currency, but it’s still frustrating. Also frustrating is that some skins you can use to determine the shapes you’re selecting come with different challenges – for example, selecting geometric shapes will occasionally have stages where the colors are all the same, presenting a difficulty spike.

Then, there’s the missed opportunity here. This is a pretty shallow game, and it would have helped if players were given different modes to play with. An endless mode where new shapes keep appearing would be a nice addition to the game’s existing stage-based mode, and multiplayer would make this feel like something a bit more interesting than an exercise in counting.

Alas, what we’re stuck with is exactly the shallow counting minigame this appears to be on the surface. And while Estiman is not outright terrible, there’s so little here of interest beyond the nice presentation that it’s difficult to recommend this to anyone except maybe small children who are learning to count. For everyone else, there are countless Puzzle games out there that are far more interesting and engaging than this.

tl;dr – Estiman is a Puzzle game with Educational elements where players are presented with groups of shapes and must select shapes from the largest group. The presentation here is nice, but the gameplay is shallow, and there’s a lack of game modes, multiplayer, or anything to make this more interesting than a simple counting game that gets old very quickly.

Grade: C-

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