When it comes to crowdfunding, it often turns out that developers don’t necessarily have to tell the public in detail how cool a game they are going to make. It’s enough to wave your hand and cheerfully say: “Hey, people, remember, in nineteen hundred, we created something cool? So – ready to repeat!"- and joyful fans will immediately begin vying with each other to beg for their money to be taken away.
Armikrog – one of the projects nurtured and nurtured by the Kickstarter audience. Developers from Pencil Test Studios immediately managed to gain a gigantic credit of trust: how, after all, Douglas Ten-Naple (Douglas TenNapel) leads the team! It was this man who at one time created Earthworm Jim and, more importantly, the legendary adventure game The Neverhood, included in the annals, the gold fund, the classics, the pantheon and wherever else good quests are supposed to be included.
About the continuation of the wonderful plasticine The Neverhood fans have been dreaming about it for almost twenty years – the original game was released in 1996. So the announcement “as if almost “UNBELIEVABLE” from the maestro himself” caused a storm of emotions and a lot of expectations.
It’s all about nutrition. Or in Python?
At first, while we are shown a cute and slightly absurd hand-drawn intro video; while the song is playing, briefly explaining how the main character got to where he ended up, it seems that the emotions and expectations were not in vain. Here it is – a real crazy plasticine adventure, just like in the good old days!
On a distant planet, about which we are told little less than nothing, a catastrophe happened: a certain “pythonium”, necessary for the aborigines to survive, ran out. Three heroic brothers go into space in search of this element. One dies, another goes missing, and only young Tomminaut, the youngest, survives the crash of his ship to become the center of our attention. Once on the surface of the planet Spiro-5, the plasticine traveler, together with his eyeless dog Beak-Beak, miraculously escapes from a very voracious monster and ends up in the Armikrog fortress – to put it mildly, a strange place.
Around this point the plot says goodbye midnightwins.uk to us. Tomminaut’s further adventures are a set of scattered puzzles and poorly understood movements based on the principle of “getting forward at least somewhere”. No, we, of course, have a chance to learn a few more details about the backstory of Spiro-5 and Armicrog along the way. But overall the script is so blurry, so insignificant and divorced from the passage that, really, there’s nothing to say about it.
Plush cube with eyes
The dialogues don’t seem very meaningful either. Actually, there are usually only two participants in the conversation: from time to time Tomminaut talks with Klyuv-Klyuv. As a rule, we are presented with another flat, forced joke that doesn’t even evoke a shadow of a smile. Facial expressions, antics, movements – everything that made up Clayman’s charm in The Neverhood, here in its infancy. Character animation is terrible. The plasticine nature of the world is almost not played up in any way, except, perhaps, for old Tommy’s ability to stuff objects directly into his chest without any harm to health.
Local monsters and locations, however, can be funny in their absurdity: an orange plush cube with eyes that can be moved back and forth like furniture really looks funny and creative. But the absence of any system in which local creatures are included, the absence of references to anything understandable and familiar, makes the existence of the aborigines slightly meaningless. Ants resembling Lincoln (Abraham Lincoln) and Jefferson (Thomas Jefferson), they seem to be somehow supposed to parody American presidents, but in fact they look like an anecdote, not fully told. The topic is not disclosed, the fakir was drunk, what the trick is is unclear.
IN The Neverhood We were waiting for an amazingly lively plasticine world with a charismatic main character who did not need words at all to be expressive. Armikrog – dead, tortured matter with a half-empty universe and a cardboard – or rather, plasticine – blank in the role of the main character. On half the walls in this performance there is nothing hanging at all, and the other half is thickly hung with guns, which, obviously, were intended to be shot in some original concept.
And again “tags”
So we get to the gameplay, which seems to be about puzzles. The classic point-and-click scheme, the classic “pixel hunting” without any hint of backlighting and tons, tons of puzzles – this is what the passage looks like Armikrog. Doesn’t sound bad enough to make you spit right away? Believe me, there are plenty of reasons to spit here.
Firstly, most of the puzzles are incredibly simple. No, in fact, the developers are seriously trying to surprise us with an analogue of the game of tag? Wait, they liked this idea so much that they repeated it several times!
Secondly, very often the solution requires a lot of frankly tedious actions that replace the actual work of the brain. For example, to calm a crying child, you need to hang monster figurines on a musical toy. Wait until the nursery rhyme plays from start to finish. Find that the figures have fallen. Swap them. Wait for next play. And so on until the bitter end. Is there some concept behind the “puzzle”?? No. Is it interesting to decide? No. Is it possible to skip the hassle and move on?? You heard correctly – neither. Moreover, this idea also seemed very fruitful to the authors, so we will have to console the crying baby three times. In the same way, of course.
Does this mean that between the stupid and shamelessly repeatable puzzles, we will be allowed to somehow interestingly play with collecting and using objects? Never in my life. Tommynaut has no inventory, so there are no things in the game – the cat cried. Basically we are asked to interact with a slightly interactive environment and walk, walk, walk again from location to location, freezing on each subsequent loading screen. There is often no logic in the sequence of actions. It’s also useless to look for logic in the “division of labor” between the main character and the dog: why can only Tomminaut press a button in one room, and the exact same button in another?! – only his pet? Apparently, a special religion prevents astronauts from overexerting their index finger.
A fly of nostalgia in the ointment
Playing Armikrog very bad. Screens often look like they forgot to add details. At the same time, in the adventure game you can find several locations and creatures that help you feel nostalgia, recognition and other pleasant emotions from the same series. A bright multi-eyed monster, an octopus-elevator, a pink room with the “ant” Lincoln – all this was done with imagination and really pleases the eye with its original style. The soundtrack, although not as memorable as in The Neverhood, It also sounds quite stylish and pleasant. In a word, there is high-quality content in adventure games, but it’s disappointingly small – as if the authors abandoned their brainchild to the mercy of fate halfway through and entrusted the final revision to Indians hired for a bowl of stew. Maybe that’s why the game was created for almost two years, and that’s why it was postponed many times, because at a certain moment there was a need for a global change in the composition of the team? To the question “where did the almost million dollars raised on Kickstarter go??"This hypothesis, however, does not answer.
Armikrog – this is a failure. Unconditional and undeniable. Believe that the project was done by the same people who were once responsible for The Neverhood, – impossible. It’s also difficult to believe in the intended use of a fabulous amount of money for such a short adventure game. A drop of nostalgia, a couple of colorful creatures and a decent soundtrack can’t compensate for the extremely weak gameplay, empty world, crumpled plot and forced jokes that can’t even be called humor.
Pros: original visual style; several colorful NPCs and locations; good music.
Cons: no gameplay; an empty and idealess universe; scant script; flat humor; "guns" that don’t fire; boring repetitive puzzles.