Developer Polygon Treehouse
Publisher United Label
Format PC (tested), Switch
Release Out nowRöki
on each area, updated as you go. There’s also a tree you
can pester for directions – or, at least, a quick lecture on
the creatures you encounter.Röki’s great strength as a fantasy is that rich
underbelly of myth, with the puzzles serving as
introductions to various colourful superstitions. Among
other things, you’ll deal with a sunlight-averse spider
queen on behalf of the Tomte, house invaders with
steeple hats who can be enticed from their boltholes
with the right kind of food. You’ll search for the real
name of the Nokken, a mournful aquatic terror, and dive
into Tove’s own past to cleanse the feverish minds of the
Jotun themselves. Most of these supernatural beings are
creatures of domestic life, things you might casually
invoke in the kitchen or to distract a misbehaving child.
This makes the role they play in Tove’s resolving of her
own personal troubles more relatable. The memory
puzzles, meanwhile, flip this idea around by turning
mundane objects into things of sorcery. One sees a
miniature Tove paddling around the bottom of a well on
a hairbrush. Another has you returning objects to their
rightful places in a collection of family scenes, gradually
exposing memories Tove would rather leave submerged.
Their individual eccentricities aside, the puzzles are
beautiful for how they structure the game’s small but
vivid world, which is spread across two open-ended
chapters plus a linear prologue. Puzzle props are
arranged so that making your way along one branch of
the map often yields an item you’ll need to make
progress in another area. There isn’t quite the same
sense, as in Gris, that everything is part of one single
interlocking conundrum, but you always feel like you’re
roaming a realm with a heart, to which everything is
joined by root and soul. The last chapter makes
discovering those connections more important: it puts
you in charge of two estranged characters in alternate
versions of an ice-locked castle, working together to
overcome obstacles that only exist in one dimension. It’s
a soothing demonstration of how puzzles can facilitate a
story about reconciliation, though it does create more
legwork: you can only move one character at a time.
Röki is both a bewitching fairytale and a considered
contribution to a genre that has plenty of peculiarities of
its own. It’s perhaps too considered at times. Stripped of
art and context, the machinations of the puzzles are
entertaining but not breathtaking. We also think the
game could have pulled more out of the darker corners
of Scandinavian fable: Röki himself is a hypnotic figure,
with his baleful Cheshire grin, but the art direction
seldom reaches for that level of monstrousness. This
isn’t so much a criticism as us asking for more, however.
Polygon Treehouse’s debut is a gentle joy in a horrible
year – a window upon a parallel world that makes
life seem a little kinder in our own.F
airytales in modern fiction often serve as
projections of a character’s turmoil, the magical
realm a mirror in which some tricky emotion
assumes a fixable form. Sometimes this results in greater
poignancy and intrigue, but the potential drawback, as
in the earnest but clumsy Sea Of Solitude, is a fantasy
that’s nothing more than metaphor, emptied of
enchantment. Röki, thankfully, has enchantment to
spare. Drawn from Scandinavian folklore, its setting may
be the means by which a young girl works through the
loss of her mother, but the game takes that world
seriously, as a body of traditions, fables and creatures
that are fascinating in themselves. This is a place that
intersects with the everyday struggles of the protagonist,
but one reality can’t be reduced to the other.
Röki is the tale of hardy teenager Tove, whose brother
Lars is spirited away one night to a secret forest by the
eponymous Röki, a being of such darkness he resembles
a hole sliced into reality, featureless save for flashing
eyes and teeth. Tove’s home life is in pieces – her father
has quietly resigned himself to drink and despair, leaving
her in charge of her daydreaming baby brother – and her
sadness finds many echoes in the other realm. In the
trees near a graveyard, a cabin lies abandoned and half-
buried, ringed by carvings of ravens. The forest’s many-
eyed talking trees are being slowly silenced by a lurid
infestation of fungus and tentacles. All this anguish
springs from a larger tragedy concerning the Jotun,
a quartet of giant animals, who long ago banished one of
their number for the crime of loving a mortal. To rescue
her brother Tove must set this realm to rights, helping
out a menagerie of storybook creatures, reuniting the
lost Jotun and unravelling the enigma of Röki himself.
The bulk of the game’s five to ten-hour span consists
of object-combination puzzles that harken back to the
point-and-click puzzlers of the 1990s. Controlling Tove
directly, you wander between fixed-perspective scenes,
scooping up various items, jostling them about in
your top-bar inventory and applying them to your
surroundings. There are also less frequent mechanical
puzzles in which you, for example, push tiles in
a banqueting chamber according to a riddle’s instructions,
or trace the passage of an orb around a sundial.
The object combinations feel a bit contrived in
places – this is one of those games where jars and bowls
have strict, dare we say pedantic applications – and the
solutions sometimes involve combing the backdrop for
things you’ve missed. Röki’s softly luminous landscape
of snow, rock and wood is captivating but a bit of a blur:
we find ourselves over-relying on the ability to highlight
all interactive objects with a click. Such moments of
awkwardness are few, however, thanks to a generous but
rarely patronising spread of hints. Tove’s reactions often
harbour a clue as to what you’re doing wrong, and she
keeps a beautifully pasted-together journal with notesPLAY
Their individual
eccentricities
aside, the
puzzles are
beautiful for how
they structure
the game’s smallbut vivid world
7
WIDER READING
Röki’s interpretations of
Scandinavian myth springs from
a range of sources, including
the Swedish illustrator John
Bauer, an artist who also
painted Tarot cards, and the
Kalevala, a 19th century Finnish
epic penned by Elias Lönnrot.
More recent inspirations include
Neil Gaiman’s reworkings of
Nordic legends and the Moomin
books – Tove is named for their
author, Tove Jansson. As this
latter influence suggests, this is
the perfect game to play with
children. Röki has little in
comparison with its creators’
previous output at Guerrilla
Games – there is, needless to
say, no combat – though it
shares with Horizon Zero Dawn
a fascination with the properties
of snow, which kicks up around
your heels as you walk.