I thought 15 bucks for some new learning material isn't too bad.
Bottom line up front: The game itself is incredibly short. I made around 100 photos in less than two hours and seemed to have explored the whole town.
For everyone who doesn't know what Shashingo is: It's a game on Steam where you explore a small japanese cityscape with a camera and take photos of objects. When you take a photo, it is read to you out loud and it gives you three related words on the back site of the photograph. Think 冷蔵庫 -> 冷たい、冷やす、入れる.
The game looks good. It uses the irusatoya clipart a lot, which works very well. There's some nice lo-fi music in the background, even if it gets droned out at first by the cars and the noises of the arcade where you start. Very immersive.
It has a review mode in which you're supposed to take a picture of a random word, similar to flash cards. There's a skill involved in the repetition of these words so you can master them.
It also has a small grammar book inside which I did not flip through completely but it surely contains some new info for me.
Where it surprisingly shines is the immersion through random posters everywhere. Those use fairly complicated (but day-to-day) Kanji. They are not part of the photographs, but most of them are manually explained through a context menu. Stuff like 桜井一丁目自治会 is not yet necessary for me to learn but it's definitely nice to see. They don't shy away from the complicated stuff while keeping it simple for everyone just starting out with Kana.
It has a gacha system which I did not use so far, but the currency for that is earned by the flashcard repetition.
I can see myself either using it just to write down some new vocabulary in my Anki or actually use the flashcard system in the game, I haven't decided yet.
by Droggelbecher