Armikrog

I backed the game on Kickstarter in 2013, downloaded the 1.01 version of the Humble store, playing on Debian GNU/Linux (v8). The game crashes almost every 2 minutes or so, most of the time when loading a new location and takes my whole system with it, or more precisely, it seems to create a loop that consume all the resource of my system requiring SysRQ interrupt to do emergency reboot. Saying their coder is incompetent would be an insult to incompetent coders everywhere. It is literally unplayable, which considering it is an FMV game, and only minimum game is actually rendering anything, quite an achievement. The game itself, of what little I have been able to play, is homage to Neverhood only on the surface. While the presentation, visuals and sounds are terrific (more or less, voice could use some cleanup) most puzzles are quite simplistic and require very little thinking or logic, only good memory, just repeat until you're done (the melody puzzle for example was atrocious). Story and world itself are not particularly engaging either (though that may improve later in the game). May be game gets better after a while and the starting easy stuff is a form of tutorial, but after 20 or so full system crashes I frankly do not feel like finding out. Wish I would never support this, what a waste of potential.... Should TenNapel and the rest actually fix the "few minor issues" (I'm not kidding, that's what they're calling it) and the game will be in a playable sate, I'll update this "review", but as of right now, do not waste your money on this, especially if you are a fellow Linux gamer.

I really don't like writing negative reviews - especially when some aspects of game are really well made, like graphics and music. But it is a computer game after all, and if bare bones of gameplay are faulty then even best gfx and sfx won't help. Below I wrote list of issues I encountered when I was playing Linux version of Armikrog: - Some reviews pointed out that system mouse cursor is displayed instead of custom one. Well, in my case game displayed BOTH. - After pressing ESC and opening main menu during gameplay, you cannot go back to your game. What about some confirmation dialog? - You cannot control volume of sound effects, music or speech. - You cannot see what's in your inventory. - At some point music and some sound effects stopped playing. Reopening game helped. - Sometimes overwriting saved game does not work. I used new save slots each time afterwards. - Some puzzles can be easily solved by clicking blindly. - For one character, subtitles appeared AFTER he stopped talking. - Leaving rooms is very bizarre: if main character just enters room, and you click on opposite edge of screen to leave it, he will turn around and come back to previous room! You must move cursor a little bit and then click so he will walk where you want to. - I reached dead end in the middle of the game. Animation of main character, crucial to move story further, looped itself for first second and didn't play further. I uninstalled the game shortly afterwards. Mind you, I'm not a adventure games veteran - I had played Neverhood when I was a kid and a couple ScummVM supported games more recently, but that's it. But even I can spot some bugs or weird UX quirks, which old games had ironed out long ago. Unfortunately, I cannot recommend Armikrog to anyone.

I'm a Neverhood fan and a Doug fan. But this is getting one star for the quality of the animation and the amazing designs Doug comes up with for worlds and characters. It's losing the other four stars for being an unplayable, badly planned mess. Warning: Spoilers ahead. I'll keep them vague but I can't fully describe the problems with this game without them. I'm a game designer, and I appreciate wanting to make things hard for the player. But this game doesn't allow players to actually *solve* puzzles by thinking them through. From room one, it's nothing but what I call "guess what the designer was thinking" puzzles. You click randomly on stuff hoping that something will happen, because there aren't any indicators to guide the player's mind towards solutions. There's no way to see the inventory items you've gathered, so you just click blindly on room objects hoping something you've got will be correct. And worse, there are things you can try as Tommynaut that don't work, giving you no reason to suspect they would work by changing to Beak-Beak instead (for example, pushing a button). Or turning a crank to reveal a door, and finding out later that you should keep turning the crank to reveal a second room from the exact same door. It's physically illogical and most players would only resort to it because, like all the other puzzles in this game, it falls to "okay, I've tried everything that makes sense, so let me just keep clicking stuff in the hopes that *something* will happen". Same thing with getting the backstory of Armikrog from the vine monster, without which you can't proceed in the game - clicking it as Tommynaut does nothing, giving you no reason to think clicking it as Beak-Beak will. I gave up in the baby mobile puzzle - I could see the answer, but by that point I was so frustrated that I didn't care anymore. Having to refer to a walkthrough in every room just to *start* a game should never be necessary. A visually stunning waste of time.

Like other reviews mention, this is beta software. It's not really at an acceptable quality level, but at least I picked it up on a sale. The music and sound effects stop working regularly, forcing a relaunch. The main menu is flaky. You even have to click around to find the save/load functionality (how can you even fail on this point? Just put them in the main menu!) It forces me to name my save games as if I cared, but can't bother to actually render the text properly in the text field. All these things add up, and result is that I go straight to a walkthrough when I'm stuck since there's a high probability that I'm stuck indefinitely only because of a bug... I hate consulting UHS and walkthroughs. There seem to have been some improvements since the top rated review though: - The cursor is customized and has context sensitivity. - The graphics and sound aren't compressed into garbage. I was actually supposed to be playing the game right now, but since the audio stopped working I just wrote this review instead.

This game was funded by nostalgia for The Neverhood. It tried to tap into the heart and soul of that 20 year old gem, but only managed to puppeteer its corpse. Sure, the art style is still as brilliant as it was 20 years prior and the set pieces are just as fun, but that's about it. The soundtrack lacks the abstract humor of the predecessor and so does the story. In fact the story is the weakest point and it just stumbles around without coherency - ironically because it tries to be grounded and level-headed instead of an abstract mess that The Neverhood was. Puzzles are severely lacking and an average shmuck like me can blaze through them without even trying too hard. The hint ghost is nearly insulting and the only difficult thing is a "find all the broken levers" quest, which is literally as substantial as "spot the hotspot" in a flash game - and the difficulty in it is not the challenging kind, but the obtuse kind. And the last puzzle is a backtrack quest - which almost made me quit. Most bugs have been patched out, but there are some occurrences, where they pop out. If you're reading the old reviews - the mouse pointer now changes for interactable objects, so it's a step-up in terms of interface. A warning though: save games don't get overwritten when you save the same name - so it's best to create a new one each time. ---- TL;DR: ---- So overall what do we have? The story falls flat, TenNapel's abstract humor got dialed back too much, soundtrack is lackluster and puzzles are dumbed down. Why 3 stars then? The positive side is P. - the heart of the story - who is simply a joy to watch whenever she's on screen. The art holds up. Some set pieces still harken back to the full-on insanity of Neverhood. And it's short, so it doesn't overstay its welcome. To sum up: this game will disappoint you, but don't let that stop you from enjoying the parts of it that are truly enjoyable.