Even though they're meant to be stories for children, there are a lot of messed up fairytales. It's very common to look up the original version of a classic fable and discover that there was a lot more violence or horror involved. There are plenty of instances of people - especially children - being eaten, beaten, stabbed, burned alive, blinded, imprisoned, tortured, etc. They're shockingly harrowing even for adults.
Roki's story is practically a fairytale itself. It goes to some fantastical places all based on Scandinavian folklore and features tons of hardship for its main character. And as one might suspect, it's occasionally disturbing. Yet, despite moments of heartbreak and terror, Roki manages to invoke a fairytale-like feeling of wonder in the player with its well-crafted narrative and fantastic puzzle design.
Never Trust A Raven
You play as Tove, a young girl who seems to have taken the weight of the world on her shoulders. She's basically taking care of her little brother Lars all on her own. Her mother died many years ago and her father is an alcoholic who does nothing but sleep in his rocking chair. They live in a small cabin in the snowy forest of an unspecified Scandinavian country. One night, after reading a story to her brother about a raven-goddess who married a human and was banished for having a half-human child, their home is attacked by a giant troll-like creature. Lars is kidnapped and dragged through a portal in the woods. Tove chases after trying to save him, leaving her stranded in a mysterious world of living trees, wish-granting dwarves, and other mythical beings. Now, she needs to figure out how to rescue Lars from his captor while simultaneously helping solve the problems of the other outlandish forest-dwellers.
If there's one word that could describe this game, it would be melancholic. It's a wonderful tale filled with sadness and regret. In the wrong hands, this could have been a stale premise that resembled something seen a dozen times before in one of the lesser Disney movies. What helps elevate Roki to something special is the way its characters are written.
Tove turns out to be a very sweet, intelligent, and brave girl who's pushed forward by a sense of duty and devotion for her family. Lars is a naive, care-free child who even in the face of certain death seems more focused on helping others. Almost every creature you run into has some sort of redeeming quality or at the very least a unique and unusual design. Even the main villain has a sympathetic yet misguided reason for taking Lars. The lowliest, most detestable members of the cast still wind up with some kind of development that helps you understand why they act the way they do. There's no voice-acting - aside from some occasional grunts, yelps, chuckles, and other sounds - but the dialogue is superb enough to give life to these strange entities. It even sneaks in some surprising laughs from time to time.
The fact that Roki aesthetically resembles a book of fairytales only helps to add to its appeal. Everything looks simplistic with bold, solid colors, but the character designs are phenomenal, especially the main antagonist and her unfortunate child. Even with the limited Unity engine, the team at Polygon Treehouse was able to create some striking facial expressions. There are a few awkward animations here and there, but it was never enough to take me out of the moment.
Magical & Logical
I take issue with a lot of adventure games, as they tend to rely too much on pixel-hunting for items and interactable objects or classic point and click "moon logic." Often, it seems like developers are too busy patting themselves on the back for their obscure puzzle solutions. Wandering around the game world for ages trying to find a key is an easy way to frustrate the player, which usually detracts from the overall experience. It's hard to get invested in a story when you've spent three hours figuring out how to make a fake mustache using cat hair and maple syrup.
Roki, in my mind, does adventure game mechanics extremely well. To prevent hours of lost wandering, you can click on the left thumbstick to highlight every interactable object in the area. You can also look through your journal, which conveniently includes a map and a section that details what you need to do or gather in each location that updates as you go along. This makes it so you spend time trying to actually solve puzzles instead of trying to click on everything in the hopes of finding progress. I'm sure some other recent adventure games have used something similar to these mechanics, but it felt like a quality-of-life adjustment that this genre should always have from now on.
It's not like it makes solving the puzzles incredibly easy, either. There will still be some moments where you're left wondering why you've been hanging onto a yellow slug or a garden trowel. Unraveling the answers to the riddles of Roki is quite satisfying as the solutions often make logical sense, which the best kind of sense. I very rarely found myself screaming, "Why would that be the answer?!" Instead, solving one conundrum would usually lead to another item being obtained, which then led to an "Aha!" moment where you realized that could be combined with another object or used to complete another quest. Thus, Roki is an adventure game that actually feels like your character is going on an adventure, which should be the damn point.
The gameplay in Roki is pretty solid. Movement is fluid, cycling through and using quest items is simple enough, and there's even a fast travel system of sorts to make getting around the world easier. If I had any real nitpicks it would be some parts where you needed to climb up walls had animations that felt a bit too long. Especially if you needed to climb up multiple walls, which could become rather tedious. There's also a large section of puzzles near the end that I thought dragged on a bit longer than it needed to but still had some inventive and charming sequences.
Rock & Roki
Roki is one of the most pleasant surprises I've had this year. A lot of highly-touted AAA games have come out and disappointed me on some level, but this story about a young girl trying to keep her broken family together even when faced with impossible challenges and brutish monsters is incredibly heart-warming. I got choked up on more than a few occasions as these poor characters were put through the emotional wringer. Even beyond the narrative, I was delighted by the game's puzzles and how solving them usually led to something special happening. This might not be a difficult game for veterans of the adventure game genre, but I was truly satisfied from beginning to end.
I may not know much about Jotun or tomtes, but I can say for certain that Roki is one of the most magical experiences you can have this year.
A PC copy of Roki was provided to TheGamer for this review. Roki is now available on PC, and will release on Nintendo Switch later this year.
Roki
Roki is a charming adventure game takes place in a magical winter wonderland, that just happens to be filled with monsters to befriend and lore to discover.