From the creators of The Neverhood comes Armikrog, a game that, despite its gorgeous claymation, fails to live up to the standards set by modern point and click adventure games.
Armikrog
Developer: Pencil Test Studios
Price: $25
Platform: PC
MonsterVine was supplied with a PC code to review
Armikrog follows the tale of space explorer Tommynaut and his dog, Geordi La Forge fan, Beak-Beak. By the way, when I say the game follows their “tale” I mean that in the absolute loosest way possible. Tommynaut and Beak-Beak crash land on a planet, enter this place called the Armikrog after escaping from being eaten by a monster, and then the story hits the brakes for the duration of the game until the very final puzzle room where suddenly all this exposition shows up. Armikrog is a frustrating game to play because there’s clearly a story here, but our protagonists don’t interact or react to anything in the environment besides the occasional “Good job Beak-Beak” when you make your dog sit on a button to open a door. There are moments when they should be commenting on something but instead just stand silently staring off into the distance. I’m okay with protagonists being passive participants in a grander story, but they’re acting more like window shoppers than actual participants here.
The only thing more frustrating than the nonexistent story is how the game itself feels so barebones and unfinished. The first issue with the game is its length. My Steam playtime says I played through it in 9 hours but that was my mistake in leaving the game open all day; in reality I probably spent closer to an hour and a half, two tops, playing through it. It would have been even longer if I hadn’t been hit by a progression bug in the final puzzle room that stopped me from revisiting a previous location to figure out how to solve the puzzle. My options were either to replay through this uninspired mess of a game or find the solution online; take a wild guess which I chose. For the $25 it’s asking for I’d much rather buy an entire season of a TellTale game or a more traditional adventure game like The Journey Down and Grim Fandango. You’re paying a ridiculous price for a game that doesn’t deliver on any of the promises it makes. The point and click genre is known for its puzzles and dialog. If you’re going to make a game like this, you better deliver either on both aspects or seriously make up for the lack of one by making the other stupendous. I already mentioned the lack of a plot so if you’re expecting the game to deliver some killer puzzles you’d be wrong. There are maybe three or four puzzles that are repeated ad-nauseam throughout the game. You’ll either push living blocks to reach a ledge, fix a baby mobile that’s constantly breaking or slide tiles around to form a picture. Those are the puzzle types you’ll encounter throughout the game with only one other puzzle that could have been decent if its solution wasn’t spoonfed to you. There’s nothing difficult about any of these puzzles and none of them become any more difficult, just more tedious.
Not only is this game severely lacking in the puzzle department, but your progression is a mixed bag of poor design and bugs hampering your progress. You might acquire a lever but since there’s no inventory menu, you can’t get a good look at the lever so you’ll sit there not knowing whether the lever you picked up won’t work on the door because the game bugged out or because it’s for some other door beyond the one you’re currently locked behind. A simple “I don’t have the right item for that” or “This won’t fit here” would have sufficed but instead the protagonists just sit there silently.
From the repeated puzzles, to Tommynaut’s stupidly slow walking speed, everything here seems purposely made to pad out an already short game. The puzzle that I feel embodies this sentiment occurs towards the very end of the game where you have to (once again) push a block to reach a ledge. The issue here is that there are various smaller blocks stopping you from pushing the bigger block forward so you need Beak-Beak to sit on the matching colored button to lower each obstacle. This puzzle takes place across five or so rooms and each time you push the block to its stopping point you have to slowly slog all the way back to Beak-Beak to pick him up because putting in a button that just makes him come back to you is apparently good game design that these developers don’t support. Did I mention that you can’t simply double-click on the next room to skip straight to it? Yea, something that’s common sense in all point and click games is noticeably absent here in what’s clearly an attempt to add as much filler as possible.
It’s also not clear what you can interact with and what you can’t. Everything is just so well blended together and you’ll usually have to click on an item various times for it to register due to the iffy detection. This makes things even more frustrating when it comes to the buttons in the game which are always interactive objects, but only when the game wants you to interact with them. In a normal game pressing the button when it’s not working will simply show you pressing the button, and maybe a goofy sound play indicating that you need to do something to get that button to work. Not here, in the land of bad game design! Instead, when you click on the button absolutely nothing happens as if it’s just another part of the scenery; Tommynaut will just stand there not reacting to anything at all. To make matters worse, the buttons which are all at waist level can only be pressed by Tommynaut or Beak-Beak and it’s never clear which you need. This is a mechanic that makes absolutely no sense considering they’re both able to reach the same button so why is one required to press it and the other unable to? Another example of this ridiculously stupid game design is how early on you need to speak with this octopus creature to acquire an item to progress to the next room; the problem here is that the game makes no sort of indication that you need to use Beak-Beak to speak to the creature. I clicked on it multiple times as Tommynaut and chalked it up as a goofy thing that I wasn’t meant to interact with further but only when I switched to Beak-Beak to go through a tunnel that brought me back to the octopus room and accidentally clicking on it did I realize that was the solution the entire time.
Another thing I want to get off my chest is Beak-Beak’s ability to grow wings when he eats a fly. This is a mechanic that’s introduced at the very beginning of the game in a cut-scene and my initial thought was how cool that was and how I can’t wait to see the neat puzzles it’s used for or other transformations I might acquire. Both of those thoughts were met with swift and merciless disappointment. First of all, all it amounts to is having Beak-Beak fly up to an area to grab an item twice in the game, nothing more. Once again, just more filler in a game full of it.
Halfway through the game, you acquire the fly required for Beak-Beak to transform and after some initial confusion as how to activate it, I quickly realized you can only transform him in those two specific locations. I’d be more okay with this if the transformation was a one-time use sort of thing but it’s not since you somehow have an infinite amount of these flies. The logic of the game shows that Beak-Beak consumes these flies to temporarily gain flight and since you’re clearly consuming them instead of coughing them back up to reuse later, it would make sense to assume that this is a finite resource. Instead, you somehow have an infinite amount of these items but for some unknown reason the game restricts you to using them in two locations. This would be like if in Machinarium you could only stretch your body in predetermined stretch zones and the game made no attempt to justify why you’re being restricted to using a mechanic that you should otherwise be able to use anywhere you wanted regardless whether or not it’s required to solve a puzzle. I guess what I’m getting at is that the game sets up this interesting mechanic that could lead to potentially clever puzzles involving both characters but instead relegates it to a simple item fetch that can only be done when the game wants you to do it. Instead of giving us something clever to solve interesting puzzles with the developers instead gave us a half-assed idea.
The Final Word
Armikrog is a somewhat functional game that is unfortunately full of archaic game design, half-baked ideas, glitches galore, insultingly repetitive puzzles, and unrealized potential.
– MonsterVine Rating: 2 out of 5 – Poor
