Creaks - Review (PC) The best puzzle game of 2020?.
Picture this, a singular screen, a singular puzzle all the information you would need and every tool is at your disposal right in front of you and yet, the solution you seek is not quite that easy. You spend several minutes poking and prodding, pushing and pulling, wondering how something that looks so simple can be so vexing, Until suddenly everything just falls into place and the once daunting obstacles are now mere child play and that my friends is the essence of Creaks.
What's good internet my name is Attack Slug and this is a review of Creaks out now on the PC for a price of 19.99. The following game is provided by GOG.com your home for DRM free video games link in the description. Creaks is a series of single room puzzles laid out over a sequential narrative that follows our unlikely hero through a sprawling labyrinthian building that was hidden just outside the walls of his apartment.
If you are familiar with the prior history of Amanita Design the studio who made Creaks, you've definitely been down this road of the weird wild and wonderful before. With a history of games such as Samorost, Machinarium and Chuchel, expectations on any new release from this team are certainly going to be high.
But when a developer renowned for point-and-click adventure games decides to pivot to a completely different genre you ask yourself, can they maintain that same high bar quality? And the answer my friends is a resounding yes. Creaks might just be the best puzzle game released this year.
And it is those brain teasers that are the center of the experience. As you set forth on this grand journey through a ramshackle mansion inhabited by sentient avian people, every new room you enter is a quandary. Each puzzle contained within strikes the perfect balance of giving you a limited number of options and yet making the solutions just obscure enough that upon completion you are kicking yourself for not solving them sooner.
The way the game slowly introduces new mechanics and then layers on small wrinkles is a master class in single room puzzle design. There's no complex inventory to worry about or manage everything you need is staring you right in the face. It is only a matter of putting those pieces together in the proper order.
But those pieces also happen to want to murder you. This is the one major deviation from the point and click adventure roots of the studio, in that death is a punishment for failure. And along with those deaths are a variety of contextual animations that are somehow both adorable and horrifying.
Thankfully the single room nature of these puzzles provide excellent checkpointing and you are never too far behind when you die, and you will die. On this journey you'll encounter dogs, jellyfish, shadow men, and goats. Or rather as what they appear to be in the shade.
Once exposed to the lights you'll find they are merely average household objects and the darkness has its way of playing tricks on you. And each new enemy type introduces yet another wrinkle in this canvas of puzzles. Each Creak, as they're called, behaves differently, and understanding exactly how they will respond to your actions is the key to making it out alive.
And when they start layering on combinations of Creaks per puzzle the interactions between the two is where the difficulty truly shines. Now there were a handful of spots where the solution required some moves the game didn't quite make clear you could do.
For example being able to push the shadow men outside of the light and not die is something I didn't even consider possible. But on the whole the game does do a fantastic job of introducing new gameplay concepts, and then iterating upon them in clever ways.
Now it is in between the puzzles that you'll peer through the cracks and absorb even more of your surroundings in this dangerous world you're delving deeper into. What begins with a cautious trepidation you'll soon find yourself conscripted into helping these bird creatures trying to stop a rampaging behemoth that is destroying the very mansion you're exploring.
And much like the other games from this studio the entire story is told without a single word of spoken dialogue. And yet without a single text bubble, the game manages to clearly convey the unique personalities of each strange creature you meet along the way.
The hand-drawn art and animation go a long way to captivate and lure you deeper into the depths of the unknown. Each character is filled to the brim with a unique charm and the intricately laid out building is overflowing with personality. And the result is that drip feeding you narrative in between these puzzles is driving you forward and you keep telling yourself just one more room.
The other curiosity you'll find between the rooms is a series of paintings. This contributes yet another layer of world building giving you a brief glimpse of this society outside of the maze you currently find yourself in. But not all of the paintings are simply for looking at as some also function as mini-games which can get surprisingly challenging.
And not every painting you'll find is on that direct path in front of you, so keep an eye out for hidden rooms if you want to catch them all. The soundtrack and sound design play a huge part here with a unique blend of otherworldly weirdness that is catchy while still being appropriately atmospheric.
And the music cue every time you finally find a solution to a super hard puzzle is a reward unto itself. Creaks is a game i can recommend to anyone who is a fan of the puzzle platformer genre, and enjoyed games like Limbo or Little Nightmares. It is incredibly effective at accomplishing exactly what it is designed to do.
And after roughly six and a half hours of play time I can say the journey you'll take is well worth the price of admission. In a pandemic summer where we are still getting a reasonably decent amount of high profile indie games, Creaks stands out by being fantastically polished, uniquely charming and remarkably clever.
