Onirim - Solitaire Card Game review
:: SLEEPER HITPrice: $0.99
Version: 1.0
App Reviewed on: iPhone SE
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Onirim is a solo card game that has finally made its way onto the App Store. The game has a sort of surreal bent to it, but feels like its own crazy variant of Solitaire. There's a lot of solo, strategic fun to be had with Onirim, even though it may not be the flashiest game out there.
The Dreamwalker
In Onirim, you play as a dreamwalker lost in a labyrinth. To escape, you must find eight oneric doors by traveling between locations, using keys, and dealing with the nightmares that come for you. If you can find the eight doors before you run out of cards, you win. Otherwise, you lose.
Since this is a card game, there's no real exploration going on. Instead, you are working your way through a 60 card deck one hand of five cards at a time. To discover doors, you can either play three cards of the same color on the board or draw a door when you have a key of the same color in your hand. At any time, you can discard cards to draw new ones, but any cards you draw or discard don't get added back into the deck.
Beware the nightmares
The strategy behind Onirim's gameplay is mainly focused around card counting and knowing which cards are likely to come next in the deck. To help you do this, Onirim lets players discard key cards to determine the next five cards in the deck. In this digital format, Onirim also conveniently keeps track of the number of nightmares left in the deck as well as what you've already discarded. If you want to know what's still left in the deck though, you'll need to consult the game's “Deck Contents” menu and cross-reference that with your discard pile.
The reason that card counting is so important in Onirim is because of the game's nightmare cards, which can truly live up to their name if you aren't careful. Any time you draw one of these cards, you have to make a choice. You can discard your hand, discard the top five cards of the deck, discard a key card in your hand, or un-discover a door you've discovered. None of these are great choices, but in any game of Onirim it's likely you'll have to make these choices on more than one occassion.
Bad dreams
I really enjoy the strategy of Onirim, but the game could use a little bit of improvement in the aesthetics department. Everything in the game looks roughly hand-painted, and not in a particularly good way.
This is a bit nit-picky, since Onirim's visuals are aligned with the original card game's look, and departing from that style for the digital version might be weird. That said, it's just a style that doesn't really work for me. It's not enough to put me off from playing the game, but it might prevent me from showing it off to others.
The bottom line
Onirim is a great little solo card game that you can get a lot out of. It may not be particularly impressive in the looks department, but that's ok for a card game.