🏚️ Creaks | Review | Xbox Series X | 9/10 | "Characterful Presentation Perfectly Fused with Classic Puzzle Gameplay" 🏚️ @Amanita_Design #IndieGames #GameDev

Machinarium is such a wonderful, wonderful game. From the soundtrack to the oddly powerful, wordless tale that unravels for the player, it’s a game that won me over with all of the above combined with a gorgeous hand-drawn art style combined with a perfectly pitched, idiosyncratic soundtrack.

Over the last decade, I have transitioned from PC gaming to pretty much pure console gaming, and so almost a decade of the work of Amanita Design has completely passed me by due to their PC exclusive nature. It was only whilst half-drunk one night - and trying to buy the Machinarium soundtrack on vinyl - that I discovered that they had released a game called Creaks that was available on Xbox…and so our love affair resumed.

A tale told without words - once again (good)- Creaks begins with a tousled-hair sporting man in an old-fashioned office writing away diligently under a flickering lamp. Soon, he discovers a vent that leads out of the room and so,  prying off boards and climbing down, it is revealed to us that the in-game world is set inside a huge, rickety and impossibly designed mansion that is being occasionally clawed at by huge, insectoid(?) digits. Seems a bad sign.

The game takes the form of a 2D platform puzzler where the entirety of the focus is on moving forward past each puzzle section. Each area has its own selection of enemies and environmental hazards and uses light as a way of turning enemies into everyday objects.

The gameplay is surprisingly traditional and yet wonderfully so. The Roald Dahl-esque visuals are so rich in detail that each new screen is to your eyes what butter is to toast, they NEED to be combined - and that alone makes the game compulsive, let alone the ‘eureka!’ moments as a seemingly baffling predicament clicks into place and you finally work your way past that barking filing cabinet that ate you alive so many times. The challenge comes from great level design and not unfairness.

The fact that, when exposed to light, these surreal, threatening enemies that kill you in one hit instantly return back to their true forms of household furniture and the like is a neat twist and I genuinely looked forward to seeing what form each enemy would return to, it’s the little moments of pleasure such as this that are at the heart of the game and make progress a continuous joy.

The beautiful, ambient music, the itchy-haired character that you just want to hug, the detail in the artwork, the atmosphere, the refinement of gameplay, the dip in-and-out accessibility…I love it.

Developer: Amanita Design