Röki PC, Switch
Fairytales 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 halfburied, ringed by carvings of ravens. The forest’s manyeyed 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 notes 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.