Review: Amanita’s Creaks Dazzles by Foregrounding Its Seussian Spirit

In Amanita Design’s Creaks, players will find a mansion situated somewhere inside the walls of a nameless young man’s house. Abiding by an almost Seussian logic, it’s alien and angular, its gargantuan rooms piled on top of one another. Amid all the levers and ladders that complicate your journey to the bottom are the creatures of the game’s namesake, who look like flying jellyfish and goats and dogs but, beneath the beam of a lightbulb, transform into furniture. A dog’s single eye will morph into a handle, its open jaw melting into an ordinary chest of drawers, never to move again until the light flips back off.

Rendered in a beautiful, spindly style by the developers at Amanita, the expressive characters move in skitters and shuffles. The hand-drawn art and its consciously restrained color palette evoke a children’s book, albeit one with detailed concentrations of lines that lend the game a faintly sinister, foreboding air. Silhouetted cutaway scenes even depict the protagonist’s various deaths at the hands of the creaks, who are hostile to varying degrees: The dogs give chase if you get too close, but the jellyfish only attack if you’re in the path of their floating patrol and the goats run away until you’ve cornered them.

Much of the game involves maneuvering through the mansion’s interconnected puzzle rooms by manipulating the creaks’ behavior, often by getting them to stand on switches or get out of the way long enough for you to, say, pull a lever that moves a bookcase or bridge blocking an exit. When the dogs chase you, for example, they will stop at the base of a ladder you’ve climbed for a short while, out of the way long enough for you to perhaps double back over the territory they guarded. They will return to their beds on little mats, but they know better than to cross any beams of light. That is, you must expose them by surprise, by flipping on a switch or moving obstacles that momentarily obstruct the beam. Though you sometimes progress by simply transforming creaks into static furniture to hold down switches, at other times you must take their full range of behaviors into account, when they’re free to roam around.

Across approximately five hours, the mechanics trickle forth gradually. Throughout, new ideas mingle with the old, as you’re introduced to the dogs, then the jellyfish, and then later a scene with both creatures that reveals the dogs to cower in fear of the jellyfish, clearing a path for you to slip by. Finding the puzzle solutions at all is generally the goal here, rather than performing precise actions; you’re given a generous amount of time to flip the proper switches and get into the right positions once you’ve figured out how to progress. And if you’re stumped, a few moments of experimentation with the levers and such tends to reveal the answer, and there are few instances where you can become stuck and need to restart a room.

As a result, the game does lack some of the sense of accomplishment and “ah-ha” moments of the best puzzle games. Reasonably clever though Creaks may be, it’s primarily a vehicle for Amanita’s brand of typically immaculate artistry, augmented here by the way the jangly music from composer Hidden Orchestra changes as the puzzle pieces fall into place. Though you encounter familiar configurations of levers and passageways and other obstacles, the mansion’s rooms all feel distinct, subtly interconnected in a way you likely won’t even notice unless you hit the load screen and see that every puzzle is coherently plotted on a zoomed-out side view of the mysterious mansion. Creaks hums along smoothly and pleasantly without calling attention to itself, to its sporadic detriment but mainly to its strength.

This game was reviewed using a press key provided by Amanita Design.