Short and pleasant puzzle game with excellent presentation! Although not groundbreaking (no pun intended) the puzzles are relatively cleverly designed and the whole audiovisual side is simply a stylistic treat!
Really charming art and sound design, and a jaunty soundtrack. The slowly revealed birds side characters and wordless plot are delightful. The puzzles are mostly fun and just challenging enough, though a few are touchy on timing or spacing in a way that was frustrating. Touch controls are surprisingly effective outside of those rare frustrating puzzles.
Expected Machinarium got something closer to Baba is you.
Lots of logic puzzles, fun but could be a tad shorter
Lots of logic puzzles, fun but could be a tad shorter
Beautiful atmosphere in a dark, but weirdly whimsical world. The game mechanics are pretty simple but they get most out of them with cleverly designed puzzles that never feel unfair.
Creaks is a typical Amanita Design game. The art style feels somewhat familiar, if you played any of their other games. Its gorgeous in its own right, for sure, but for me it just felt a bit too grey and colorless. I didn't really enjoy exploring its world, but that may be by design. Also, I don't know if my brain is just wired differently, but some of these puzzles really broke me. I wouldn't consider them to be hard, but somehow, they broke my brain. Not sure, if anyone else feel like this. But this greatly diminished the fun I had with this game.
All of this though, is not really important for me personally. Because the soundtrack this game received is nothing short of a masterpiece. Hidden Orchestra is something that has landed on my playlist for years now and the Creaks OST is up there with the best for me. It's so good I feel it's a bit wasted on this game, but hey, its on Spotify so I'm just gonna continue listening to it there.
All of this though, is not really important for me personally. Because the soundtrack this game received is nothing short of a masterpiece. Hidden Orchestra is something that has landed on my playlist for years now and the Creaks OST is up there with the best for me. It's so good I feel it's a bit wasted on this game, but hey, its on Spotify so I'm just gonna continue listening to it there.
I enjoyed this. It's a 2D puzzle-platformer by Czech studio Amanita Design, the same team who made Machinarium and Botanicula.
You play as a nameless, voiceless protagonist who one day discovers a passage to an underground world which he falls into and then has to escape from. In practice it reminded me of games like Braid and The Swapper: you make your way through over 50 discrete puzzle screens by ascending and descending ladders, pulling levers, standing on pressure plates and manipulating enemy behaviours to get to the exit without using combat. The gimmick this time around is that light turns monsters into innocuous items of household furniture, so you end up throwing switches at the right moment to turn cuboid dogs into chests of drawers, or scary mimic men into pointy coat stands, and then shift them around to find a way forwards. The puzzles are satisfying without ever being too obscure; I managed to complete the game without using a guide, and I wasn't stuck on any one room for more than ten minutes. In fact, to begin with I thought things were a bit too simplistic, with one puzzle room feeling too much like the last. From about halfway onwards, however, additional mechanics are added to make each scene feel a bit more substantial, and by the final act you're clearing rooms which, to begin with, seemed impossibly convoluted.
The best thing about the game, however, is the way it looks: every single room is brilliantly drawn in an over-detailed, claustrophobic style that reminded me of Marcus Sendak's art for Where The Wild Things Are, or Olivia Kemp's hyper-meticulous pen and ink drawings. The structure itself that you're exploring - an impossible, crumbling, teetering, higgledy-piggledy castle, like a surrealist Gormenghast - is fantastic, and the best reward the game doles out for completing one screen is the treat of seeing the next. The sometimes ominous, sometimes jazzy soundtrack adds to the atmosphere, too, building slowly in time with your thoughts as you figure out each puzzle.
If you like games of this type, or if you appreciate Amanita's earlier stuff, then I would definitely check this out. It doesn't quite have Machinarium's freshness, nor the brain-shifting depth of something like Braid, but it's four hours or so well spent over a weekend, and nearly every room will have you reaching for the Switch's screenshot button. It looks especially lovely on dat OLED screen, too.
8/10
You play as a nameless, voiceless protagonist who one day discovers a passage to an underground world which he falls into and then has to escape from. In practice it reminded me of games like Braid and The Swapper: you make your way through over 50 discrete puzzle screens by ascending and descending ladders, pulling levers, standing on pressure plates and manipulating enemy behaviours to get to the exit without using combat. The gimmick this time around is that light turns monsters into innocuous items of household furniture, so you end up throwing switches at the right moment to turn cuboid dogs into chests of drawers, or scary mimic men into pointy coat stands, and then shift them around to find a way forwards. The puzzles are satisfying without ever being too obscure; I managed to complete the game without using a guide, and I wasn't stuck on any one room for more than ten minutes. In fact, to begin with I thought things were a bit too simplistic, with one puzzle room feeling too much like the last. From about halfway onwards, however, additional mechanics are added to make each scene feel a bit more substantial, and by the final act you're clearing rooms which, to begin with, seemed impossibly convoluted.
The best thing about the game, however, is the way it looks: every single room is brilliantly drawn in an over-detailed, claustrophobic style that reminded me of Marcus Sendak's art for Where The Wild Things Are, or Olivia Kemp's hyper-meticulous pen and ink drawings. The structure itself that you're exploring - an impossible, crumbling, teetering, higgledy-piggledy castle, like a surrealist Gormenghast - is fantastic, and the best reward the game doles out for completing one screen is the treat of seeing the next. The sometimes ominous, sometimes jazzy soundtrack adds to the atmosphere, too, building slowly in time with your thoughts as you figure out each puzzle.
If you like games of this type, or if you appreciate Amanita's earlier stuff, then I would definitely check this out. It doesn't quite have Machinarium's freshness, nor the brain-shifting depth of something like Braid, but it's four hours or so well spent over a weekend, and nearly every room will have you reaching for the Switch's screenshot button. It looks especially lovely on dat OLED screen, too.
8/10
Un frasco demasiado grande para tan poco líquido.
Pros:
- Como siempre, Amanita nos brinda un apartado artístico absolutamente impecable.
- La complejidad de los puzles está muy bien medida, y son lo suficientemente cortos para no hacerse bola.
- El imaginario que pone frente al jugador es tremendamente original y un gran soplo de aire fresco.
Contras:
- Demasiados puzles para tan poca variación en sus mecánicas.
- Es fácil caer en la apatía y no tener ganas por descubrir la siguiente nueva mecánica que implementará el juego, ante el largo recorrido requerido para ello.
- Los puzles no casan con el entorno, que intenta contarte una historia de manera demasiado fragmentada.
Pros:
- Como siempre, Amanita nos brinda un apartado artístico absolutamente impecable.
- La complejidad de los puzles está muy bien medida, y son lo suficientemente cortos para no hacerse bola.
- El imaginario que pone frente al jugador es tremendamente original y un gran soplo de aire fresco.
Contras:
- Demasiados puzles para tan poca variación en sus mecánicas.
- Es fácil caer en la apatía y no tener ganas por descubrir la siguiente nueva mecánica que implementará el juego, ante el largo recorrido requerido para ello.
- Los puzles no casan con el entorno, que intenta contarte una historia de manera demasiado fragmentada.