NAIRI: Tower of Shirin is a point-and-click adventure game about an upper-class girl named Nairi whose life is thrown into chaos when the Royal Guard capture her parents and force her to flee to avoid the same fate. After being waylaid by bandits during her escape, Nairi returns to the city in the hopes of freeing her parents and learning the truth behind their arrest.
NAIRI: Tower of Shirin
HomeBearStudio
Price: $9.99
Platforms: PC (reviewed), Nintendo Switch
MonsterVine was provided with a PC code for review.
With cutscenes that look like they came from a children’s storybook, a world inhabited by anthropomorphic animals in addition to humans, and cute character designs in general, NAIRI has an adorable visual style. It also brings its world to life by presenting things so naturally that within a few minutes, I had completely accepted a world where a human girl like Nairi exists alongside bandit cats and gangster ducks.
It is a fairly traditional point-and-click adventure game, where you’ll need to gather, combine, and use items to solve puzzles, either by overcoming physical obstacles or by giving them to the correct characters. Your cursor changes when it’s over something you can interact with, which reduces the need for pixel-hunting, although a handful of puzzles require you to be frustratingly precise with where you’re clicking. You can also find hidden coins by clicking other parts of the environment—in a style reminiscent of finding hint coins in the Professor Layton series—and while you do need coins for certain puzzles, they are abundant enough that I never had a problem.
One frustrating aspect of the game design, however, is its navigation. As is typical for this type of game, you click the edge of the screen, a doorway, a path, etc. to move to new areas. However, because the perspective of each area isn’t consistent, navigation isn’t always intuitive. You might click the left side of the screen to move to one area, but then click the right side of the screen in that area to move to a third. I found myself getting lost despite the relatively small world simply because the direction I thought I should go often took me back to where I came from.
However, the game largely takes place across a few self-contained areas, and while backtracking is a necessity to solve puzzles, the navigation is more of an inconvenience than anything else. Most of the puzzles are inventory-based, although later parts of the game introduce more cryptic, challenging puzzles.
NAIRI is heavily story-driven, and this is both its greatest strength and a weakness. I grew to love the characters and their world. Nairi and the supporting cast are endearing, the dialogue is funny, and the story is compelling. I became completely invested in the mysterious happenings in the city of Shirin and the warnings about a devastating storm, and as the game approached its climax, I couldn’t wait to see how it would all work out—which made it all the more disappointing when it ended on a cliffhanger.
Apparently NAIRI: Tower of Shirin is only the first part of the story. It ended just as things really started to pick up, leaving the majority of its questions unanswered. I assume the developers intend to make a sequel, but the lack of resolution left me disappointed in what was otherwise a fun adventure.
The Final Word
Despite some flaws NAIRI: Tower of Shirin is an adorable game with solid point-and-click adventure mechanics and the potential for a great story, although the abrupt cliffhanger ending prevents it from being completely satisfying.
– MonsterVine Review Score: 3.5 out of 5 – Fair
