Intelligence: Anime girls

Intelligence: Anime girls is a puzzle game where players must reassemble scrambled images of anime girls by sliding tiles into the correct order, similar to the classic ’15’ puzzle. The game features 12 levels with varying difficulty: six levels on a 3×3 grid and six on a more challenging 4×4 grid. Each level presents a different image to solve, with tiles randomly generated at the start to ensure replayability. Developed by Laush Studio, it’s designed to be a brain-teasing casual experience with Steam achievements to unlock.

Intelligence: Anime girls: A Sliding Puzzle in a Crowded Sea

In the vast and often bewildering ecosystem of Steam, where thousands of titles vie for attention, some games are not blockbusters but curious footnotes. Intelligence: Anime girls is one such artifact—a minimalist puzzle game that embodies both the accessibility of modern indie development and the stark reality of asset-flip skepticism. This is not a review of a masterpiece, but a historical excavation of a digital oddity that speaks volumes about its time and place.

Development History & Context

The Studio and The Vision

Intelligence: Anime girls was developed and published by Laush Studio, ostensibly a one-person operation led by Dmitriy Sergeevich Laush. Released on June 2, 2018, it was created using the Unity engine, a tool that democratized game development but also lowered the barrier for entry to a flood of low-effort projects.

The year 2018 was the peak of the “Steam Direct” era. Valve’s new submission process, which replaced the more curated Greenlight system, allowed a staggering number of games onto the platform. This led to a marketplace saturated with quick, inexpensive titles designed for volume sales rather than artistic merit. Laush Studio was a prolific participant in this environment; the “Intelligence” franchise alone saw numerous entries in 2018, including Intelligence: Dinosaurs, Intelligence: Cats, and Intelligence: Dogs. The vision, if it can be called that, was seemingly a commercial one: identify a simple, public-domain game mechanic, pair it with a popular thematic hook (anime), and release it at a low price point to capture casual browser traffic.

Technological Constraints

There were none. The game’s stated minimum requirements—a Windows XP-era Athlon processor, 1GB of RAM, and a GeForce 9600 GT—are so modest they are practically archaeological. The entire game occupies a mere 94 MB of storage space. This wasn’t a game pushing technological boundaries; it was a proof-of-concept for the barest minimum viable product.

Narrative & Thematic Deep Dive

The “Plot”

To analyze the narrative of Intelligence: Anime girls is to confront a profound void. There is no story. There are no characters with backstories, no dialogue, no conflict, and no resolution—at least, not in any traditional literary sense.

The “Characters”

The titular “anime girls” are not characters. They are static, royalty-free or lightly edited anime-style images, likely sourced from the internet, that serve as the completed picture for each puzzle. The official description promises “beautiful anime girls” and the game contains “images of twelve anime girls.” Their purpose is purely iconographic; they are the reward for completing a task, a visual motif chosen for its broad appeal within certain online communities. They have no names, no personalities, and no agency. They are objects to be reassembled.

Underlying Themes

Thematically, the game inadvertently becomes a meta-commentary on its own existence. Its primary theme is order versus chaos. The player’s goal is to take a randomized, chaotic state (the scrambled tiles) and impose order upon it to recreate a predefined image. On a broader level, this mirrors the player’s own struggle to find meaning or value within the chaotic, often random assortment of games on digital storefronts.

A secondary, unintentional theme is commodification. The game reduces the popular anime aesthetic to a mere asset, a skin applied to a generic framework to make it marketable. It highlights how cultural tropes can be stripped of their context and used as a blunt instrument for commerce.

Gameplay Mechanics & Systems

The Core Loop: A Classic Reinvented… Not

The gameplay of Intelligence: Anime girls is brutally simple and entirely unoriginal. It is a digital implementation of the classic 15-puzzle, also known as the sliding puzzle or “Tag.”

• The Objective: Each level presents a grid (either 3×3 or 4×4) with one tile missing. The tiles are sections of a larger anime image. The player must slide the tiles one by one into the empty space to eventually reassemble the complete picture.
• The Process: Using a point-and-select interface, the player clicks a tile adjacent to the empty space to slide it over. The game features “random generation of tiles at the start of the level,” meaning the puzzle is scrambled differently each time, theoretically offering variability.
• The Progression: The game contains 12 levels in total: six on a 3×3 grid and six on a 4×4 grid. Completing all levels constitutes the entirety of the experience.

Analysis of Systems

The mechanics are functionally sound—they work. A sliding puzzle is a proven, centuries-old concept. However, Intelligence: Anime girls implements it with zero innovation or polish.

• UI/UX: The interface is spartan. It serves its purpose but lacks any flair, feedback, or options. It is the absolute baseline.
• Progression & “Achievements”: The game includes 12 Steam Achievements, which are undoubtedly tied to completing each of the 12 levels. This is a common tactic for such titles, offering an easy 100% completion rate for achievement hunters, which can be a driver of sales in a saturated market.
• The Flaw: The fatal flaw is not in the concept but in the execution’s lack of ambition. There are no additional modes, no time trials, no move counters, no hints systems, no custom image support, and no leaderboards. It is the bare-bones version of a well-worn idea.

World-Building, Art & Sound

Visual Direction: Asset Flips and Aesthetic Disconnect

The art is the game’s central selling point and its greatest source of cognitive dissonance. The promotional material promises “beautiful anime girls,” and the core images are indeed typical of the anime style. However, the presentation is utterly disjointed.

The user-defined tags on Steam tell a confusing story: alongside expected tags like Anime, Puzzle, and Casual are utterly baffling ones like War, World War II, Violent, and Mature. This suggests one of two things: either the game’s algorithmically chosen “similar games” led to a bizarre and inaccurate tagging spree by users, or the actual anime images used contained themes incongruous with a simple puzzle game. This creates a jarring atmosphere where the gameplay is blandly family-friendly, but the metadata implies a completely different, non-existent experience.

Sound Design

The provided sources make no mention of sound or music. If it exists, it is likely a minimal, looping track or simple sound effects for tile movement. It is not a component the game leverages to create a meaningful atmosphere.

Overall Contribution

The elements of art and sound do not contribute to a cohesive world. They are placed in opposition. The game exists in a thematic vacuum, where its mechanics, its visuals, and its surrounding metadata fail to form a coherent whole.

Reception & Legacy

Critical and Commercial Reception

Upon its release, Intelligence: Anime girls vanished into the churn of the Steam marketplace. It garnered no professional critic reviews. Its user reception, as recorded on Steam, is “Mixed.” With only 21 user reviews at the time of sourcing, 57% were positive. The player score on aggregator sites sits around 54/100.

Financially, it was a niche product. Sales estimates place its lifetime ownership between 0–20,000 copies, with gross revenue likely measured in the low thousands of dollars—a typical result for a hyper-niche title in its category.

Evolving Reputation and Legacy

The legacy of Intelligence: Anime girls is not one of influence but of representation. It serves as a perfect case study for a specific genre of early-2018 Steam games:
* The Franchise Exploit: It exemplifies the strategy of creating multiple, slight variations of a single codebase to maximize storefront presence.
* The Algorithm Game: Its existence seems designed to exploit Steam’s recommendation algorithms and tags to reach audiences searching for either puzzle games or anime content.
* A Historical Marker: It is a preserved artifact of a specific period in digital game distribution, marking the time when the gates opened and the market was flooded. It represents the low end of the indie spectrum, a product born not of passion but of opportunity within a new system.

It did not influence subsequent puzzle games. Instead, it was influenced by the commercial pressures of its platform. Its legacy is as a data point in the study of video game marketplaces, not video game design.

Conclusion

Intelligence: Anime girls is not a “good game” by any standard critical measure. It is a rudimentary, content-thin implementation of a classic puzzle with a cynically chosen aesthetic wrapper. It lacks innovation, narrative, artistic cohesion, and compelling reason to exist beyond its meager price tag.

However, to dismiss it entirely is to ignore its value as a historical document. As a professional historian of the medium, one must look at games like this not for what they are, but for what they represent. Intelligence: Anime girls is a stark embodiment of the commodification and saturation enabled by the tools and storefronts of its time. It is a game that feels algorithmically generated for a market that was itself becoming increasingly algorithmic.

The final verdict is paradoxical. As a piece of entertainment, it is forgettable and inconsequential. As a cultural artifact representing a specific moment in the evolution of digital game distribution, it is a fascinating, if bleak, footnote. It is a sliding puzzle about anime girls that, ultimately, reveals a much larger picture about the state of the industry that created it.