Eventually you’ll realise that you can click on Tommy’s dog ‘Beak Beak’ to control him, and that he can pass through weird portals in the walls of Armikrog to find hidden items. There are no icons or interface to get in the way, which helps the wonderful claymation visuals stand on their own, but can cause confusion as to what you can and can’t interact with. Point-and-clicking around the screen will guide Tommy around and also allow him to pick up items to store in his extra-dimensional gut. Others might be more difficult, like the varying quality of the voice acting – not necessarily the performances themselves, but the actual recording quality, which at times is acceptable, but others is noticeably poor.Īs a throwback to The Neverhood, actually controlling Tommynaut is exceedingly simple. It’s problems like these that really detract from the overall experience of Armikrog. Hopefully some of these issues can eventually be resolved. Audio now tends to move out of sync with cutscenes and gameplay, and upon replaying the game I became stuck in a loop of triggering a cutscene, completing the following puzzle, and then triggering the cutscene and puzzle again. Now that the patch has come through, the visual glitches seem to have largely vanished, but new problems have cropped up. On occasion, doors which were open would glitch between open and shut states, sometimes actually aiding me in puzzles by allowing me to pass through when I shouldn’t. ![]() The sound would also occasionally completely disappear, necessitating a restart. Personally, I encountered glitches in the game’s sprites clipping in and out of the environment and moving out of sync. Unfortunately, we come to my main problem with the game, which is that the atmosphere of Armikrog is marred by numerous technical issues.īefore the recent patch, Armikrog had a range of issues for various players, which ranged from the irritating to the game-breaking. Some of my favourite games are in the Myst series, which usually require you to read books of journals just to figure out what you’re even meant to be doing. I’m actually a fan of games which are more about atmosphere than spoonfeeding you the entire story. On the other hand, you could always listen to the incomprehensible alien exposition dumps delivered by elevator octopodes – several of which appear throughout the game and can only be correctly translated after completing one of the final puzzles. The long history is available through a slab of text in one of the game’s walls – a callback to a similar endless exposition hallway in The Neverhood – which does mean you’d best be prepared for half an hour of reading if you want to get the most of out of the game. As you explore the fortress ‘Armikrog’,the meaty material of the backstory of Armikrog and its inhabitants proves to be hard to access, and the game will make you work for it. Your claymation hero, an astronaut fortuitously named Tommynaut, has arrived on planet Spiro-5 to search for P-tonium, to save his homeworld’s people (who really aren’t referenced again beyond this). Many of these qualities have carried over to Armikrog, although not without a few hiccups.Īrmikrog starts strong, with an amazingly catchy tune right out of the gate which briefly explains the premise of the game. The Neverhood was many things – charmingly cartoonish, amazing to look at, bafflingly obtuse at times and awesome to listen to. ![]() We’ve seen Charles Cecil bring us Broken Sword 5, Jane Jensen back with Moebius: Empire Rising, Chris Jones with a new Tex Murphy game and now the creative talent behind claymation point-and-click adventure game The Neverhood raised nearly US $1,000,000 on Kickstarter to develop a spiritual successor, Armikrog. Developers of 90’s adventure games in particular have found a goldmine of fans with fond childhood memories, now older, with money to spend and ready to put up some dosh for another helping. After the success of Double Fine’s Broken Age on Kickstarter, there’s been a veritable deluge of crowdfunded nostalgia-driven revivals.
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