You control 5 little characters as they try to plant a light seed while avoiding the dark parasites that also inhabit their tree. It was released in 2012 by Amanita Design for Windows and Linux and has an almost perfect positive score on Steam.īotanicula has been described as a heartwarming adventure that takes you through over 150 detailed and beautiful locations with hundreds of funny animations and secret bonuses. Some of these are there to be watched and enjoyed, while others are minigames - none will prove too taxing - but they all add yet more flavour to the environment and are a highlight.Botanicula is an indie point-and-click adventure game following the humorous adventures of 5 quirky creatures. Creaks also includes a number of mechanical paintings to discover. His nervous scratching animations and perpetually freaked-out expressions are always fun to watch. The dingy setting is equally epic libraries, rickety lifts, dusty cellars and halls filled with faces all add to an otherworldly atmosphere that your tousle-headed hero looks completely out of place exploring. The colossal monster plaguing the underground city’s bird-like denizens makes for some fascinating cutscenes. Manoeuvring them into place provides the meat of Creaks puzzle design over the eight to ten hours it’ll take to complete.Īs is Amanita’s brand, the story is told through mime, gesticulation and garbled nonsense, and it works incredibly well. Each creature has specific ticks that let you know what their next move will be: dog eyes turn red before attacking, doppelgangers thrust their pointy heads towards you if you get too close, and the passive jellyfish look up and down to determine their next path. The interaction between your enemies (some are terrified of others and will actively retreat from them) provides innovative solutions as well. The clockwork paintings are a lovely collectible that actually add to the game, rather than being thrown in for trophy hunters When timing puzzles are introduced, the frustration factor jumps significantly - though that is matched by the satisfaction you’ll feel in cracking a puzzle involving lining up multiple creatures to set off switches. Even so, the sheer number of rooms you are tasked with overcoming means that repetition starts to creep in at the halfway mark. The game drip-feeds incremental changes throughout, such as giving you a remote control to activate lights, or throwing puzzles at you requiring several layers of challenges to be solved before progressing. It’s a linearity that will be familiar to puzzle fans but perhaps not to those with knowledge of Amanita’s back catalogue, who may be expecting the delight of uncovering new and quirky discoveries on their own rather than being funneled down a set route. There is usually only one route through a room which you need to figure out by watching the movements of the creatures and tinkering with the switches to see what they activate. Where Creaks suffers is in its familiarity, both with the genre and - later - with itself. Once transformed, the now harmless hat stand or bedside table can be moved to hold down pressure pads to open up new areas or manipulate the room in other clever ways…as long as the light remains on them. Getting caught by one is an instant fail, but each room contains ladders, levers and switches which your protagonist must use to block off enemies, force them outside of their standard patrol patterns, or even turn them into household objects by shining a light on them. Floating jellyfish, robot dogs and evil doppelgangers all work to block your way from one room to the next as you descend into ever stranger depths. The bedsit of a young man kicks off the creepy shenanigans, revealing a hole in his wall that leads to an underground world filled with weird inhabitants. Yet all of Amanita’s hallmarks are present and correct: sublime sound design, fantastic hand-drawn artwork, kooky animation and gibberish voice acting that passes for language in a far more endearing way than Yooka-Laylee and its ilk managed. That fact alone may prove disappointing to fans of the studio expecting a horror take on their earlier games. In comparison, Creaks is a linear puzzle platform game.
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