BitSummit Gaiden is an online games festival taking place on June 27 and June 28, and one of the games featured is Giraffe and Annika, an action-adventure game that launched for Steam earlier this year and is now on its way to the PlayStation 4 and Nintendo Switch on August 25.
The BitSummit demo gives you two options: you can either start from the beginning and play for 20 minutes, or you can try a rhythm stage. I decided to start from the beginning. After a brief, dream-like scene of someone talking to Annika, our cat-eared protagonist woke up on an island with no memory of how she got there. Then I was given control, with no further commentary on Annika’s confusion or goals. I would have thought the demo picked up shortly after the beginning if not for the message at the start.
I began exploring the island, picking pumpkins and gathering them into a bag before I actually had it (which made me think the option to open the bag was bugged for a little while), admiring the beautiful scenery and discovering that you can swim as long as you reach land before your health drains completely, and then finally entering the house of someone named Lisa, who had left helpful notes throughout the island. Once I left the house, I met a boy named Giraffe, and that’s when the game started to gain a clearer direction.
Story moments are told through charming, comic-like scenes. One such scene confirmed that Annika had lost her memory, as Giraffe knew her but she had no memory of him. He asked her to help him out by collecting star fragments from the island’s dungeons, which only Annika could enter. Despite some reluctance, Annika agreed to the task.
Giraffe and Annika has a day/night cycle, and you can sleep to move time ahead to either morning or night. Since the dungeon wouldn’t open until night, I slept to pass the time and then headed on in. While the dungeon itself had a beautiful design and I loved finding chests containing the cat-themed collectible artwork known as Meowsterpieces, enemies proved to be a bit of a problem. There’s no combat, so I was left to run past enemies as best I could. Fortunately, healing spots were frequent, allowing me to make it through without too much trouble.
At the end of the dungeon, and just as my demo time was running out, Annika found the first star fragment, only to be confronted by a witch. When a staff appeared in front of Annika, I wondered if the game was about to introduce combat–but instead of traditional fighting, it turned out to be a rhythm-based battle! Up until this point, I’d assumed the rhythm stage option for the demo was a mini-game, but instead, it’s how boss encounters work. While the witch fired projectiles at me, I deflected them by timing my button presses according to the beats of the song until I finally won. The rhythm stage option at the start of the demo appears to be the boss at the end of the second dungeon, and the game gave me an option both times to select the difficulty for the song–a plus if you’re interested in an action-adventure aspect but not so great at rhythm games.
Overall, Giraffe and Annika left me curious about its story and intrigued by its world, with the gameplay being pleasant enough so far. Despite a few rough spots at the beginning and the awkwardness of avoiding enemies in the dungeon, the core of the game seems solid.
