While I was never a huge fan of Amanita Design, some of their titles have been and still remain among my favorite games. What I always admired about their projects is the playfulness and unpredictability, with the art and music coming close second. And pretty much every time they wanted to do something more puzzle oriented, I was far less interested with their critical darling Machinarium being my least favorite of the titles. Yet, I was curious about what Creaks would turn out to be – a puzzle platformer from the studio is a new direction after all. The results are not as fun as I hoped they would be.
Since we are talking about an Amanita Design game, it’s not surprising that it looks and animates fantastically. It has a really cool style which looks great in motion and the soundtrack is as always great. This time, they’ve worked with Hidden Orchestra and the end result is something in-between of what that project does and what you usually get out of Floex’ work. Not among the very best works from the studio, but beautiful nonetheless. The story/mood is also somewhat familiar for the studio, mixing fairy tale, surreal and realistic elements into something that generally feels nice, but I can’t say that I cared about it this time around. Which isn’t helped by the fact, that this might be the most predictable narrative from the studio yet, with every sequence, every setup, every joke being obvious from the start.
It wouldn’t be that important if the gameplay was great, but it isn’t. It’s not bad either, mind you, just surprisingly repetitive for an Amanita Design game. The puzzles are more or less designed around using light to your advantage, avoiding enemies and tricking them into becoming helpful. Which provides occasionally fun puzzles that genuinely feel exciting when they click, but a lot of the time they just work and you simply solve them and move on, without any joy from solving them. It would be fine if the genre of puzzle platforming wasn’t so full of varied interesting examples from older times and since its resurgence in 2010s. Creaks simply gets too samey and too tiresome, and none of the optional minigames help bring variety either. At least the game doesn’t last too long and never completely overstays its welcome.
For a first attempt at a new genre, Creaks is a solid title for Amanita Design. It has some cool moments and it’s often cute, it’s music and visuals are great and it is at least somewhat novel with its core ideas and it is impressive how everything is a huge map that remembers your actions. But it’s not great and can get a bit boring. If you’re absolutely in love with anything the studio does, give it a go some day, but if you were looking for a fantastic puzzle platformer, there are far more exciting examples.