Armikrog

Oh boy I review another Kickstarter game I supported that really disappointed me. First off let me talk about the things I liked. I love the aesthetic of the game. At a time when claymation games are super rare, it's nice to see one getting this much attention. The soundtrack is really good. Terry Scott Taylor did a good job on the soundtrack. Now for the things I didn't like. This game is way too short. You can finish this game in about 2 hours, not worth $25 price tag. The puzzles are too easy and for game which puzzles make up 100% of the gameplay, that is unacceptable. But worse of all the characters and story are so bland. After completing the game I know next to nothing about Tommynaut and Beak-Beak. Which is really sad because one of them dies in the game. This game doesn't try to flesh out the characters at all as their is little to no dialogue between the two or cutscenes. The voices of Michael J. Nelson and Rob Paulsen was wasted in this game. The Story is the greatest failure of this game. The story is so bland and so simple that it can't even hold a candle to The Neverhood's story. And the game ending is so disappointing and is just trying to pave the way for the eventual sequel. This game feels like an incomplete demo of a game and not a full priced game. In the end this game tried to be a spiritual successor to the Neverhood but instead it turned out to be a very mediocre adventure game that did not understand why the Neverhood was so great in the first place.

Armikrog is a point & click adventure that takes you literally back to the roots of point & click adventures. There is no hand holding here, no inventory and a basic cursor to work with. This game was meant to be the spiritual successor to (in)famous Neverhood. It delivers in giving people a short hommage to the Neverhood. The story is alright, fun and enjoyable for it. Nothing more nothing less. While it surely delivers in the visual department, it lacks on a lot of other fronts. - The release has been quite buggy which didn't help the game. I assume the game will be worked on in the future to clean all the bugs. - The game is fairly short. It took me under 10 hours, but I am very slow. If I knew what to do including all the puzzle solutions from the get go I assume it can be completed in around two to three hours. - Since the game is short in length I do not think it is worth the current price tag. Unless you're a hardcore fan of that kind of work, I'd wait for a sale. It pains me to say that since I love the developers for creating my childhood game: Skullmonkeys and the Neverhood, I just think the amount of content in armikrog is lacking. - The puzzles are fairly easy to solve, with a few nice ones. I personally like them but they are repeating themselves a couple of times unfortunately. The music by Terry Taylor is quite a nice listen to though. So why do I sitll give this game 4 stars? With a tiny kickstarter budget meant for 1 year of work to make the game from scratch it is perhaps a great feat that they managed to still make the game after 2,5 years. So the rating is because of the work and effort that went into the creation of it. There is no studio that makes games with stop-motion clay animation. Also keep in mind the development team has been quite small. There's only so much work three people can do and claymation takes a lot of work. That's why I see the game more as a piece of art.

The game is very short, I had other games that got me entertained for at least ten times longer for the same price. Most of the puzzles are very straightforward, although there are some occasional "pixelhunting", and some of the clues are hard to find. Controlling the chairs through solved obstacles can get frustrating, as they still bump and stop at them. The biggest letdown however are the lullaby puzzles - boring, annoying, and the third one made me miss a cutscene, cause I went to grab a drink while I had to wait for the puzzle to finish. The whole game feels like a rushed DLC, or "episode 0", with a not too bad, but very short and undeveloped story.

I don't know why people are leaving reviews saying the game has been fixed. It is still almost unplayably broken. It also feels incredibly cheap, like the person who made it doesn't understand how to make games.

It could be a good game. BUT the UI/UX is sometimes horrible. Advice: NEVER TRY TO OVERWRITE A SAVE FILE. IT ****DOESN'T**** WORK. THE GAME WON'T SAVE ANYTHING. ***THEREFORE ALWAYS MAKE A NEW SAVE.***