I looked forward to walking into each room of Armikrog out of anticipation of what creativity I would see next. The gooey, colorful clay art and animations are the most obvious draw to this experience and they alone are worth trudging through the less impressive parts of the game. The story is about Tommynaut and his dog Beak Beak who are the last hope to save their homeworld. Nothing in Armikrog is quite ‘normal,’ — Tommynaut stores inventory items in his stomach, Beak Beak can not only talk but can fly, and well, as you can see in the trailer and screenshots, it’s a wildly creative and wacky world that you’ll find yourself in.
The jist of the story is that the duo have crash landed on a strange planet and they need to recover a special element in order to save their own planet. The language used in the cutscenes that advance the story is intentionally gibberish, although the art used during these cutscenes is fairly clear. Anyway, the story establishes itself immediately and stays the course throughout what amounts to just a four to five hour adventure. The story is sufficient, but it wasn’t really a focal point for me as I worked my way through (with help from 123Pazu’s guide at times). Four to five hours for a point and click is not very long, but, stop motion clay animation is exceptionally hard work, so the time frame I am fine with. One of the core, un-patchable issues with Armikrog though is just how, well, ‘linear,’ for the lack of a better term it feels. The creativity from room to room is visually apparent and a strong point of the game, but the puzzle design and the purpose of doing the puzzles in the first place is disappointingly repetitious and tedious.
Worse still is that communication with the player — heck even between the characters in the game — is almost nonexistant. It’s very rare that you can get any kind feedback from Tommynaut or Beak Beak, and there are practically zero NPCs to talk to. Any of those that you do are one-sided, super brief conversations. It’s strange that dialog is so limited in a point and click, but ultimately forgivable.
Less forgivable are the puzzles. Figuring out how to open doors, find levers, and restore power to then use this vehicle to travel between areas makes up the vast majority of your adventuring. As you travel between each area, the puzzle design remains largely the same, almost exactly the same, and the purpose for doing those puzzles does as well. The visuals change quite a lot, thankfully, but I was surprised at how both puzzle design and purpose were re-used a few times over. The lack of being able to examine items in the world, or your inventory, or even get item descriptions and highlights over key objects is another disappointment. There is a whole lot of extra ‘blind’ pointing and clicking going on in Armikrog as you try to figure out what’s what. I also experienced some frustrations with the click-zones for objects, causing me to either switch between characters inadvertently or have to re-click to properly climb over a box or grab onto a tentacle to go between floors — it’s a bit hard to describe, but it’s another clear sign of a lack of development time or polish, despite multiple delays in its release.
On that note, it actually wasn’t until a patch just released a couple of days ago that the cursor in game was changed from my Windows cursor to one, you know, made for the game. Yeah, this might seem minor, but it was an early heads up to me that this game needed more time, despite being Kickstarted two and a half years ago. Almost any game can benefit from more dev time, but Armikrog released with a laundry list of miscellaneous bugs, some critical and some not, that are at least being addressed post launch. The industry is (sadly) at a point that releasing a very buggy game is not that uncommon anymore, whether it’s a AAA studio or a Kickstarted title like this one. It’s a shame, but simply a testament to where things are at right now. I’m not trying to make excuses, and indeed Armikrog does unfortunately fall into the ‘needs patching’ category. I’m fortunate that during my play through, I did not experience any critical bugs, but I did have some graphical issues with the menu and a little bit of screen tearing in very brief stints.
Armikrog clearly has its fair share of issues ranging from design to technical problems. It’s not the class of game I was hoping for, but I’m nonetheless happy to have experienced it. For point and click enthusiasts, it’s absolutely worth playing, but I couldn’t blame you if you waited for some more patching and tweaking. With that, let’s get to the summary…
