Review: Polygon Treehouse’s Röki Barely Stands Apart in a Crowded Field

Few of the game’s problems would be insurmountable in the face of an engaging narrative.

Röki

Magical creatures fill the corners of Polygon Treehouse’s Röki, many of them plucked from Scandinavian myth: the trolls under bridges, the miniature Tomte helpers that look like garden gnomes, the Fossegrim, the Nokken. None, though, occupy so large a space in this adventure game as the fabled Dead Mom, whose loss a human girl named Tove must confront while she searches the forest near her home for Lars, her missing brother.

The rhythms of Tove’s mission won’t be surprising to most players, as she combs the forest—and, then, a castle—for objects to stick in her inventory and later use to solve puzzles. But there are broader, and also familiar, shortcomings within the game. Solutions tend to come in the form of exacting and roundabout item combinations, such as one where you use a large bone as part of a torch rather than, say, any of the branches that litter the forest. And some solutions may elude the player altogether, as they’re not always noticeable even when you press the button that highlights an area’s interactive objects. Elsewhere, you’ll likely find yourself tackling puzzles through process of elimination, interacting with everything you possibly can until you find the solution, such as the seeds in a small puddle that apparently must be ground up in a mortar and pestle to grease some gears.

Though much of the game involves unlocking shortcuts between one area and another, they’re never so transformative as to dull the meandering puzzle design that favors backtracking. Worse, the interface always seems to require a few too many button presses to accomplish simple tasks: To pull a mushroom out of the soil, you must open the inventory and select the trowel and drag the image of the tool from your inventory bar onto the mushroom in the game world. Then you do it again, perhaps many times over if you don’t immediately notice the slight but important structural differences of the mushrooms in your inventory before you re-bury them elsewhere. Even the moments that confine you to a small area seem to take forever, as in one scene that finds you watching the same handful of slow climbing animations while Tove laboriously maneuvers around to place mirrors in different locations.

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Irritating though they may be, few of these problems would be insurmountable in the face of an engaging narrative. But like countless other pretty games trading on emotion, Röki drones on about feelings, namely grief—all of it documented in Tove’s illustrated journal, and complete with occasional asides about Dead Mom or Sad Dad. Repressed memories, shadow selves, and mysterious environmental sicknesses rear their tired heads. Beyond the trappings of Scandinavian myth, there’s precious little to set Röki apart in an already overcrowded space.

This game was reviewed using a review code provided by Heaven Media.

Score: 
 Developer: Polygon Treehouse  Publisher: United Label  Platform: PC  Release Date: July 23, 2020  ESRB: T  ESRB Descriptions: Blood, Violence  Buy: Game

Steven Scaife

Steven Nguyen Scaife is a freelance writer whose work has appeared in Buzzfeed News, Fanbyte, Polygon, The Awl, Rock Paper Shotgun, EGM, and others. He is reluctantly based in the Midwest.

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