It is impossible not to adore Amanita Design. His silent stories, his gloomy visual style loaded with so much affection at the same time, the way he understands puzzles, the music of his games … All of that returns in Creaks, an attractive mix of graphic adventure, puzzles and a lot of mystery. We tell you everything in our analysis.
Amanita Design does its thing. His video games are never big blockbusters. They go their own way and grow, game by game, their unique way of telling their stories . What characterizes them most is their powerful visual style. Amanita Design has a dirty but very elegant line. Always reload each of your screens in great detail. Its settings and characters are gloomy , that is why the mission of its heroes is usually to find hope, love or a glimmer of illusion in their dark worlds .
The studio began to attract the attention of critics and the public with its adorable Machinarium , a graphic adventure published in 2009 and that, in my humble opinion, lives up to the foundations of the genre such as The Secret of the Monkey Island, Loom or Broken Sword. The key to reaching this milestone was not just making a beautiful game , but knowing what to do with its art in relation to storytelling and gameplay.
The studio games purposely mute their protagonists , letting their protagonists ‘ settings and actions do the talking. That gets the player to get fully into their universes, that they need to know more about their cryptic history . But the good thing is that his stories do not speak of saving the world or anything like that, but of simple common human problems that are easy to empathize with. Amanita Design knows a lot about sequential comic book storytelling, and you can tell by how he uses the partitions of the rooms that appear in his games, the lighting or the way the avatar looks to build something similar to vignettes, hiding secrets in some and in others when it suits him. Following Machinarium, Amanita began releasing several more experimental games that allowed her to further refine her language. Before the game in question, we had Pilgrims , a gem that you can find in Apple Arcade and that further polished the silent dialogues of their games. All that evolution, all that work, all that visual beauty, that special way of narrating, is in Creaks .
We solve puzzles in this first gameplay contact with Creaks, the newest from Amanita Design
As is customary in Amanita, the game is as gloomy as it is beautifulWhat sets Creaks apart from his previous work is that we never had so many puzzles to solve before. The protagonist finds a hole in his room, just as Alice does inside a tree . After crossing it, he discovers a ladder. Without thinking twice, he uses it to descend into a mysterious city. In it you will find very unique characters that are hidden from the light. Our task will be to reach the end of the adventure trying to understand what the game is telling us. The great challenge will be to overcome all the enigmas that Creaks poses to us until its conclusion. The interesting thing, if we know the trajectory of Amanita Design, is that these puzzles are solved by making characters, enemies and settings connect with each other through light. In essence, it’s one more way to experiment with that wordless studio language . Already in the background, let’s see how this Creaks has turned out .
Be pretty with intention
What is most striking is its artistic section. It is outstanding . Creaks is a puzzle game. After descending the stairs from his room to a strange new world, we go hand in hand with our avatar, stay in room, solving one puzzle after another. This play structure is not new ; What’s more, it is the usual in adventure titles that change violence for riddles. The interesting thing is how it presents each new room. The solution to the challenge is always usually to activate some switches, dodge enemies in more or less ingenious ways, take advantage of the resources of the area in our favor and advance through a door or a staircase. This isn’t new either, so what is it that makes Creaks so interesting? Wellthe way each room is presented .
The world is immersive and absorbing. It is one of the great claims.
Creaks characters do not usually speak, and when they decide to articulate a word, they do so in an unintelligible language. To understand what they are saying we have to interpret the scenarios and their connections, their clothes, their gestures and the future and past events that we have played; but also to the enemies and the scenarios that we travel. That is why, every time we land in a new area, we will gawk at the environment , analyzing each painting, each element and how it is placed. But what Creaks intends is not to have a clear and crystalline collection to decipher, but to be suggestive . That allows you to add things and junk that shouldn’t be there. This amalgam of visual stimuli so participatory in the narration, achieves thatthe immersion is effective and that the world that the game paints is very absorbing. You’ll want to solve each puzzle to see what’s next.
This preciousness with so much intention also has music as an ally. The soundtrack is very jazzy. It is light and accompanies. The interesting thing is that when you have done well a step in a puzzle that involves several, the melody adds more arrangements to its raw composition , adds a drum rhythm or an unexpected wind accompaniment. When you hear these changes, you get excited because you know that you are doing well, that you have little left to discover a new place in this strange place . This way of understanding musical composition is reminiscent of what Koji Kondo did in Super Mario Worldand so many other titles after him: do you remember how when we got on Yoshi’s rump, a percussion arrangement was added to the rhythmic base? Well this is something similar only in a different genre. And, for this, jazz and its variants is the ideal thing to use. For all these decisions, Creaks is impeccable in its presentation . What he lacks in is his pace of play and the way he presents his playable progression. It’s not that it’s a problem, since being slow, moderate, calm and encouraging pause is common in Amanita productions; but that does not mean that sometimes we want to ask the game for more variety served before .
The Monsters and the Lights of Creaks
Creaks puzzles are complex but not impossibleAs is usual with Amanita’s work, the studio always wants to do a lot with very little . It is not easy to design how they do it; a lot of perfectionism is perceived in his strokes, ambition and intention. That makes their works have a lot of identity, but in return the rhythm of the game suffers; What does this mean? Well, Creaks does not have a great variety of enemies or situations. The essence of his puzzles is repeated with nuances. The monsters that we have to avoid become everyday objects and transportable using light. Some fear the others, they have specific ways of moving that we have to alter, and space is very mechanical; that is, it is dependent on buttons, pulleys, and switches. That is why it is easyfeel a certain repetition or fatigue when playing and solving seven very similar puzzles in a row.
This is not bad, of course. Portal, for example , only has one enemy type, cubes, lava, a portal cannon, and a cake at the end; or so says GlaDOS, wow. But Creaks is not able to twist its simple playable proposal with such success and it lasts longer than Valve’s game . If the original Portal lasted six hours, like this one, it would be very heavy, but Creaks has that ambition. He manages to take you well to his auction, it is very worth the trip, but at the cost of the fact that the best thing is to play games of thirty minutes or one hour at most, to avoid the feeling of repetition. His puzzles are never extremely complex, but they are quite difficult. It requires that we think things through and even be skilled enough to go beyond them. And I say this because in many rooms there are secrets that lead us to new clues about what the game wants to tell us.
It is recommended to play Creaks calmly and being very observantBecause at Creaks we not only move forward, we solve puzzles and we marvel, intrigued, with Amanita’s illustrations. We also find Flemish-style paintings (15th and 16th centuries), with a punk touch, and figures inside that move. Some of them are even playable . They all seem totally disconnected from what Creaks is telling us, but they are actually very eloquent about the world the studio has painted for us. They are also complemented by moments in which our protagonist looks through a crack, opens his mouth in amazement, and sees the inhabitants of this universe interact. Little by little, he will get closer to them. In conclusion: it is a remarkable video game, somewhat slow for many and which also has a couple of hours to spare due to its modest playable proposal. But the way he tells us what he wants to convey, the basis of his puzzles, his visual style and his way of treating music, it is very worth it.
“Very good”
Creaks
Amanita Design returns with Creaks. It is not at the height of his best work: Machinarium, but it is an attractive step forward in his own way of narrating, drawing and allowing us to play his worlds. Somewhat slow at times and a little scarce in the variations in its playability for its duration, but remarkable for those of us who love this type of suggestive proposals.
- His artistic style is outstanding
- Elegance in the way of telling us your story
- How enemies react to light
- The secrets that the game has
- It does something repetitive in long games
- You need more variety of enemies
