Pnevmo-Capsula: Domiki – PC Review

Genre: Casual steampunk puzzle
Developer: Pomeshkin Valentin Igorevich
Publisher: Pomeshkin Valentin Igorevich
Release Date: October 4th, 2021
Edited by AlexKnight2005

Puzzles. They’ve always been there to challenge our minds, make our lives a little bit more interesting, or give us some fun. And that is exactly what this game aims for. If you feel you’re up for a challenge, Welcome to Pnevmo-Capsula: Domiki.

Set in a steampunk version of 1970s Russia, you will be taking the role of a pneumatic capsule that needs to gather and deliver mail. Sounds easy, right? But your adventure will be taken in a small railcar, and to make your journey a little more difficult, you will be faced with many obstacles. Electricity, dead-ends, and of course, many puzzles that you will need to solve to get the mail and figure out what will be your next steps.

One of the first things you might discover is that the only graphical settings you can change are the display resolution which can go up to a staggering 7680*4320, vertical sync, and post-processing which will give the game a real steampunk feeling.

But the small amount of settings does not change the fact that game devs went all in and made the environment look great. There aren’t many places where you would just go forward without being able to admire the backgrounds or your adjacent surroundings.

The heavy industrial 1970s are depicted amazingly, with Big factories, in contrast to small offices and houses. But because it has been a little while since people took care of the whole site, there are many traces of decay. The atmosphere is what caught my eye, and I kept it through the whole game.

Of course, to fit the graphics, you need a good soundtrack. And that is another thing the devs aced. It doesn’t often happen that I would listen to the soundtrack separately from the game. But that is something I would gladly do with the music from this game.

In addition, the sounds fit the game as well, and they help you a lot to get immersed. None of them sound unnatural, and they’re all exactly what you would expect to hear while riding an old railcar through a large factory.

Pnevmo-Capsula: Domiki is an indie casual game that allows you to enjoy your journey and focus on the puzzles.

In the beginning, you’re thrown right into the action. There are a few quick tutorial messages you will get, but that is all you need. You can easily control the whole railcar with one hand since all you control is movement itself, speed, which works in a “walk/run” way, and one single action button which causes your capsule to jolt an electric spark around you, which is how you will interact with the world. There are certain points where you can use the electricity to switch the sliding rails and therefore change the way that you are going. This is something you will be doing a lot since the points of interest are basically all over the map, and sometimes you will be forced to go from one point to another and back again. At those points, I often found that it is much easier just to drive off the dead end, fall off, and respawn back at the start because every switch that you move will stay the same.

Another obstacle you will face is electrical walls, which you need to turn off by finding the power source and overloading it. Again, that will cause you to travel all over the stage again and again.

The last thing that will stand in your way is the puzzles themselves. There are several stations where you need to figure out the right “phone” number to get the message that will allow you to move on through the map. That is why you need to pay attention to your surroundings around those stations because, usually, the solutions are on adjacent posters on the walls.

What bothered me, though, was that even though the controls are really simple and easy, it’s not that easy to work with them. Because they always relate to the camera that you can’t control. And that is the second weak point for me. The camera is usually fixed at one point but can switch up to another place very fast. And the only places where that doesn’t happen are those where the camera goes further back so that you can see the bigger picture. But it also sometimes causes you to lose track of your railcar.

Since it is a game focused on puzzles, you won’t find much of a story connected. It’s mostly just the tiny personal stories of those who sent the messages. I think that is a little bit of a shame because I would love to see some bigger story behind it all or at least a better explanation of what happened and why the whole site looks so abandoned.

Pros:

• Fun concept
• Nice environment
• Soundtrack

Cons:

• Confusing camera
• Lack of a story
• Some points of interest are too far away from each other

Coipher gives Pnevmo-Capsula: Domiki for PC a Drastik Measure of 6.0 out of 10.0 (60)