Röki

Great atmosphere, but held back by repetitive loop. I love the characters, music, and art design: visually and conceptually, this game is an absolute little gem. Unfortunately, the gameplay relies far too heavily on fetch quests and continuous backtracking. You spend most of your time retrieving 4–5 identical objects just to solve a puzzle, only to move on to the next area and do the exact same thing all over again. Often, this backtracking feels entirely arbitrary rather than clever or meaningful. Compared to games with intelligent puzzle design that respect your time, this can feel like tedious busywork. I still recommend it for its incredible charm, but with a warning: avoid it if you are easily frustrated by constant fetch quests and repetition.

Go die in the snow Lars, I don't care about you. Devs that try and force an emotional attachment are just forcing their particular world view upon the players, it's just so tedious, tired and predictable.

I love games where I get to experience a different culture and/or mythology from my own and this one does it really well! I felt really engaged with the world and story, meeting all these fantastical creatures and getting to befriend them! It definitely lives up to being family friendly, which I appreciated so much after the last game I played featuring Scandinavian folklore (Bramble the Mountain King) which ended up being WAY too dark for my personal tastes. I especially enjoyed Tove as the protagonist, so kind and caring but with a feisty temper that can sometimes be her downfall. It made her feel remarkably real, especially as she struggles not just to save her brother but hold her little broken family together! I did enjoy all the puzzles, especially in the final area, and found several to be pretty tricky! The soundtrack, voice acting, and animation was also topnotch and made for such a great gaming experience!! An overall pretty wholesome game with fun folklore and an interesting narrative!

Gorgeous, atmospheric Scandinavian narrative puzzle game, where you play a girl, Tove, trying to find her little brother. I did have to check walkthroughs a couple of times to figure out where things were but likely I should've been using the F to find things to interact with instead. I just kept forgetting it was there. The story is really touching, a bit creepy, and surreal.

This is one of those games where I wish I could leave a neutral recommendation on. There's a lot I like about this game, but also a lot that just frustrates me to the point of not fully enjoying it while playing. I loved the art, music, and the different characters, but was annoyed at the pace of the game progression and how you are running back and forth a lot. The story is fine even if it's a bit cliche with a tragic death of a mom and the kids having to venture out into a magical world and save it. I did enjoy the nods towards norse mythology and how that tied to the main story. The puzzles themselves were fine for the majority of the game, but I really found it frustrating when you were missing one piece of the puzzle and had to try to find it by running around the area and use a specific item to obtain it. Chapter 3 was really guilty of doing this and maybe a bit too long to my liking. Still I'd say the game has more positives than negatives, but I'd definitely consider getting it on sale.

This game was such a wonderful surprise. I did not expect the emotional depth and the heartbreaking story. Nor the rather mature themes like dealing with repressed trauma. The art style is beautiful. The minimal dubbing works. The music is hauntingly great. The puzzles vary in difficulty. Most are not that hard, there are some that might take a bit of time to figure out. I haven't felt frustrated at any point, neither because it's too easy nor because I'm stuck. I will say the one drawback is you have to go from location to location back and forth quite a lot to complete quests and puzzles, which might become tedious. Other than that - an absolutely wonderful game. Highly recommended!