Review: Greak: Memories of Azur Is a Vibrantly Detailed but Hollow Family Affair

Greak is too busy rushing toward an ill-defined future, skimming past conflict and characters alike.

Greak: Memories of Azur
Photo: Team17

Navegante Entertainment’s Greak: Memories of Azur begins mid-invasion, with adorable pale-blue-skinned Courines fleeing from the hideous, animal-skinned Urlags and the Blighted creatures devouring the land of Azur. Though you’ll explore some fancy tombs and temples over the course of this light six-hour adventure, the game never adequately conveys the title’s promise of learning about the land, as Greak is too busy rushing toward an ill-defined future, skimming past conflict and characters alike.

This rapid-paced approach makes Greak an unfulfilling game, one that underutilizes its colorful, hand-drawn locations and occasionally creative tandem puzzles. There just isn’t enough purpose to the world, with the stakes never rising beyond Greak’s desire to reunite with his family. For one, we don’t learn what the little Courine’s sister, Adara, an oracle, has been up to, nor do we get a sense of his elder brother Raydel’s service as a soldier.

Without emotional stakes, it never feels like you’re reuniting a family so much as recruiting them. It doesn’t help that interaction between them is generally limited to their utility in solving puzzles, with Greak crawling through small holes, Adara holding her breath underwater, and Raydel using his shield to reflect lasers and hookshot to cross gaps. They are, in essence, as collectible as the various MacGuffins you’re tasked with finding, whether that’s something as banal as rope or as portentous sounding as a “primeval cribe.”

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By himself, Greak feels like a dull carbon copy of so many protagonists from recent action-exploration games, namely Hollow Knight. Having Adara and Raydel eventually accompany him, so that you’re simultaneously controlling three characters, adds a superficially more creative, if awkward, layer to the game, a multi-character gimmick that Greak never fully utilizes. But the puzzles tend toward the rote, as in one character needing to hold down a pressure plate or crank open a door to facilitate the path forward for everyone in the group.

As for the game’s bosses, they’re most efficiently fought one on one, keeping the other characters out of harm’s way. It’s telling, then, that the game’s final area, the labyrinthine Aldalar Tomb, pointedly separates the three heroes. All that build-up to unite the family, and in the end, Greak: Memories of Azur finds it best to keep them apart.

The game was reviewed using a code provided by Team17.

Score: 
 Developer: Navegante Entertainment  Publisher: Team17  Platform: PC  Release Date: August 3, 2021  ESRB: E10+  ESRB Descriptions: Fantasy Violence  Buy: Game

Aaron Riccio

Aaron has been playing games since the late ’80s and writing about them since the early ’00s. He also obsessively writes about crossword clues at The Crossword Scholar.

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