Developer: Krealit
Publisher: Krealit
Platform: PC
Tested on: PC
Caligo – Review
Caligo is an experience where you’ll walk around in a twisted but beautiful afterlife, while listening to an interesting story about life and reality. This game does not have much gameplay elements at all, but it is an interesting journey through a beautifully constructed world. Caligo has been developed and published by the indie game studio Krealit.
Story
This game is a gorgeous 3D artwork accompanied by a rather philosophical story, questioning the nature of life and reality. The story unfolds as you walk around through the many beautiful landscapes. The character you play first tries to learn how he got in the strange world where he finds himself in, and after a short while he learns that a certain aspect of himself is creating worlds based on his memories of living life. You are in a world which is a sort of afterlife, created for yourself. The character you play is in constant conversation with the other characters in this world, aspects of himself and death. The story of this game is an interesting series of thoughts, but there’s not much you can influence: it’s a linear storyline you’ll follow, with one choice at the very end. You’ll just listen to the story being told as you explore the world, and while you walk around, the story gives the environments context.
Graphics
Every environment you’ll walk through feels like an artwork, beautifully arranged and carefully constructed to evoke a certain feeling in the player. The use of color and lighting is great. There’s a great diversity in landscapes, it ranges from fairytale forests and Gigeresque halls, to a frozen scene of twisted warfare and skeletons of monstrous ships decaying on a grim coast. The art is really great, the environments all have their own unique charm, and look very carefully constructed. You can really imagine them to be the perfect interpretations or fantasies of places in your mind, fantasy or memory.
Sounds
The music is amazing and really impressive. Each scene has its own music, which is fitting to the unique atmosphere of that chapter. The conversations during the game are completely narrated. The voice acting isn’t perfect and feels a bit staged every now and then, but the different voices do reflect the nature of the characters nicely.
Gameplay
Caligo is a first person exploration adventure game. It isn’t an actual game as such, it’s more like an artwork you can explore from all sides. You mostly just walk around, while the story is being told while you keep moving, in conversation between your character and other characters. This game feels like an illustration of a philosophical story which you can experience by exploring, and it’s a prime example of a walking simulator.
You can’t jump or run, and you walk rather slowly, but that is okay to be able to experience the beauty around you. You’ll mostly follow a path, which is required to trigger the story of the game and eventually finish it, but you can stray from the path to explore a bit more, and try to find some more drawings. As you explore, you’ll sometimes walk into an invisible wall, so there’s a limit in how far you can stray from the path. Sometimes, this makes it a bit unclear where you can go to explore further, and where you can’t go.
You’ll be able to collect several drawings as you explore. Finding them all will require you to explore extensively. The drawings are pictures of scenes which look related to the environment you are in, but there’s no story accompanying the drawings, so it’s not completely clear what their function is, other than collecting them all for an achievement.
The game consist of several chapters, and as you play through the game these chapters get auto-saved, so you’ll be able to experience them again. Each chapter is a separate environment. The game is rather short; if you explore moderately it’ll take you about one hour to play through, up to maybe two hours if you try to find every drawing for the achievement.
Conclusion
If you like just to explore and walk through beautiful, carefully constructed landscapes while listening to an interesting story, you’ll probably like this game. It takes about one to two hours to walk through, depending on how much exploring you do. The game is just a few dollars, and for that price it’s a good experience. Caligo is a beautiful game with an interesting story, however, if you want a game where you can have influence on the story as a player, you’ll probably want to look somewhere else.
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