Developer: Pencil Test Studios
Publisher: Versus Evil
Platform: PC, Xbox One, PS4
Tested on: Xbox One
Armikrog – Review
Wallace & Gromit has been the go-to series when it comes to stop-motion series and movies, a thing that’s seemingly becoming a thing of the past. The time where movies like The Nightmare Before Christmas and Corpse Bride were top of the movie charts seems but a distant memory, but now Armikrog is doing an effort to pay a proper homage to said clay animation series and movies. Armikrog uses the same stop-motion techniques to offer you an intergalactic adventure tale of Tommynaut and his sidekick Beak-Beak. The original game was released in 2015 and has now made its way to the next generation of consoles.
Story
You play as Tommynaut, one of a family of three brothers, who are all known for their intergalactic achievements, or at least your brothers are. You, the youngest, don’t have any achievements under your belt, and thus the rest of your species doesn’t really have any faith in you, but they have to let you roam the galaxy now your brothers are missing. Your planet is slowly dying because of the lack of P-tonium, which pretty much powers whatever your planet needs to keep on living. That being said, you are off, together with your dog-like partner Beak-Beak. After crashing on the very strange looking planet of Spiro 5, you find yourselves running for your lives after being chased by a huge monster. Luckily there’s a fortress nearby in which you seek shelter. This fortress is called Armikrog and has many rooms, and before you’re able to escape with your heiny intact, you’ll have to solve the mysteries this place has to offer.
Overall the story is rather slim at the beginning and when talking to certain characters, they only give you story content in their language, without subtitles, which makes the overall underlying story lost in translation. Nonetheless, if you soldier on, you’ll notice that the game starts to properly bloom and is becoming more and more interesting.
Graphics
Graphically, even if you’re not fond of the clay stop-motion graphics, the game is simply stunning and the developers should be commended for their effort of bringing this quirky title to life. The main characters might look a tad more simple than pretty much all the rest of the game, this is probably due to the fact that Tommynaut and Beak-Beak have a wider set of moves and thus a simpler character is easier to work with. That being said, the movements of all characters are fluent and you often tend to forget that this game has been made with a simple material such as clay.
Equally amazing are the backdrops and different locations you’ll find yourself in. While the game takes place in the castle of Armikrog, all of the rooms come in different sizes, shapes, colors and have a variety of clutter to inspect. Safe for some puzzles you’ll have to complete, everything has also been made with clay, making this a very impressive project in term of graphical prowess.
Sound
Armikrog does have a few catchy tunes, even if the game might have fared even better if the soundtrack was thickened even further. Nonetheless, the main themes are simple, fun and easily persuade you to hum along. Voice acting is also present in this title and even though it starts off a bit dodgy, the quality goes up a tenfold after the first few spoken lines. The alien voices and those of the statues guiding you help set the mood for this special adventure.
Gameplay
Armikrog is a fairly traditional point-and-click adventure game with a proper amount of interesting intermediate puzzles, but a relatively short lifespan. You’ll wade through this funny space adventure in a few hours, at least if you’re a quite experienced sleuth.
Overall, the game proves to be very simple to get the hang of, even with the lack of explanation at the beginning of the story. You’ll just roam around the castle of Armikrog, and you’ll have to hover over items to see which ones you can interact with, often providing you with puzzles, or other items. The latter is often only after a short puzzle and to keep the game a bit easier for the player, many puzzles aren’t available from the start, or some doors remain locked until you have found the right items or solved the proper puzzle. Nonetheless, the first few minutes the game proves to be overwhelming, as you’re able to enter a lot of rooms already, making it hard to see where you’ll actually have to start in order to slowly find your way out of the castle.
While nearly all puzzles in the game are fairly manageable or give you a set of clues beforehand, there are a few that feel a bit random or that perhaps lack the necessary pre-given data for you to solve it properly, without having to guess between a set amount of different outcomes. Nonetheless, the difficulty in this title makes it quite accessible for a wide variety of puzzle enthusiasts.
Other than the relatively short duration of the game, Armikrog suffers from extremely poorly ported controls, making many puzzles annoyingly tedious. It’s clear that Armikrog was initially a PC game, which is a great platform for a game such as this, but the creators never bothered to properly optimize the controls for console usage, making nearly everything feel rather clumsy and circumlocutory. With better controls, the game would have easily been one of the better titles in the genre the current generation of consoles would have seen.
Conclusion
Armikrog is a fun title thanks to the puzzles, but perhaps even more so thanks to the theme and the graphical style. Nonetheless, the mostly satisfying experience is hampered by its short longevity and its horrible control scheme. Of course, if you can toss aside the poor controls and the fact you’ll finish the game in about three to five hours, this title is well worth checking out.
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