Mass Appixel - Small Games with Big Ideas: "Armikrog"

Written by Mike Cervantes

I’d first heard of this title back in 2013, when it had gained a slow ascent into notoriety through its initial Kickstarter campaign. Now, if you follow Kickstarter as well as I do, you know that many of their video game-based proposals are “dream projects.” Created by former developers of triple-A studios in order to “give the fans what they want,” which is often a spiritual successor to the single title they’ve become best known for.  Armikrog is no exception to this rule, except when it comes to the notoriety of the title it’s based on.

Armikrog is developed by Pencil Test games, a studio populated by notable developers such as Mike Dietz, Ed Schofield, and Armikrog’s lead art designer, Doug TenNapel. Doug is best known in the gaming industry as the creator of Earthworm Jim, but achieved his most significant critical acclaim when he had formed “The Neverhood” studios in 1996 with Mike and Ed. Armikrog is the spiritual sequel to the first game produced in that studio, also named “The Neverhood,” and published by the then fledgling Dreamworks Interactive studio.

The Neverhood was a radical departure from Earthworm Jim. It was a PC point and click adventure game, and before you dare to compare it to the likes of King’s Quest or Monkey Island, it actually had a lot more in common with 1993’s Myst. It featured a large emphasis on puzzle solving, slowly unraveling the abstract landscape while allowing the player to develop an understanding of the game’s deep and inspired backstory.

Oh, and it was also animated entirely in clay.

With the blessing of the entertainment super-goliath, Stephen Spielberg-branded publisher, Doug, Mike, and Ed were given complete creative freedom on their project. This led to the unique art style possessed by the Neverhood. Sure, there were clay-animated video games before, but The Neverhood had all those earlier attempts beat through sheer scope: All of the sets, scenery, and full motion video for the game were painstakingly hand-sculpted and stop-motion animated, with many sound effects recorded in-house for authenticity. The game also featured an innovative soundtrack by famed blues guitarist and songwriter Terry Scott Taylor, potentially setting a precedent for acoustic-based ambient music with lyrics in video games. 

All of this was crammed into a single-layer CD ROM and released during the heyday of Windows 95. The critics raved. PC magazines applauded the art style, the intellect of the puzzles, and the awesome soundtrack. The Neverhood picked up critical acclaim and “best of” magazine recommendations hand over fist.

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The sales, however, fell completely flat.

The Neverhood is infamous for selling a mere 42,000 copies in the United States. The remaining copies were packaged as premiums for Gateway PCs, and the game became a frequent search item on eBay only a year later. (That’s right, smart kids, there actually was an eBay in 1996.) This is despite the fact that anyone who actually played the game, whether they were a game reporter or a fan, absolutely loved the title, and has been at Doug TenNapel’s doorstep for years asking for a sequel.

And so, thanks to Kickstarter, and the willingness of Doug, Mike, and Ed to do all that clay sculpting over again, we have Armikrog, a game that is like The Neverhood in premise, style, and design. But the question remains: does a game that was once considered ahead of its time, re-designed and released 17 years later, prove that it has finally arrived?  

Merrmhmermmmhhhh…

First it would be best to talk about the high points: While Armikrog does not re-invent much from its inspired predecessor, it takes advantage of modern day hardware in order to give its unique graphical style a real boost. First off, the whole darn thing is in HD, playable in 1280 x 720 at minimum. This is easily better than the original game’s scale, where at times you felt you could put your whole fist through a pixel. The production value is also much improved between both games since better video editing and special effects software exists to the public, and thus also exists to Doug, Mike, and Ed. The result is that the game looks exactly as good as a game should these days: enough to almost make you forget that you’re actually looking at real (as in not CG) characters, objects and landscapes.

Another major high-point is that, despite the game Armikrog is based on likely went un-played by many, a recognizable effort was made in order to eliminate the more frustrating parts of the original’s gameplay. The original Neverhood had what I’ve affectionately called “camera-train” sequences. First-person segments where you’d walk the character over a set path only stopping to choose whether you’d go left, right, or further forward. It’s difficult to describe, but the closest thing you could compare it to were the extremely limited first-person segments in NES games like Friday the 13th or Fester’s Quest. These are thankfully gone from Armikrog, leaving you to explore the entirety of the game in a much more consistent side-scrolling format that allows you to appreciate the scope as you walk from room to room.

Those room puzzles were a highlight of the original game, along with an excellent inventory system which permitted your character to automatically take out whatever object was needed out of his inventory, and apply it to the puzzle at hand. Also said character moves faster and is more responsive than the original, and isn’t required to walk through any long, mostly empty, hallways that virtually required a fast-forwarding cheat code to tolerate. 

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A good deal of what made up the very sympathetic core of The Neverhood seems to be missing from this game, especially in terms of story. The Neverhood belongs in gaming textbooks as an excellent example of interactive lore building: every puzzle and every clickable object gave you a glimpse into the universe as created by Doug TenNapel, and as you slowly unraveled the intricacies of the game itself, the more you felt like you were taking part in this unique fantasy-world. Not everything in the original game was integrated seamlessly, mind you. A good deal of the backstory was simply written in text on the wall of the aforementioned fast-forward inducing giant hallway. Also, I wish I could say more about the original game’s story, but to do so would create spoilers for people still looking to hunt this game down. The notion of that, however, only serves to further my point: the story served the entirety of the game, and vice-versa.

The story for Armikrog is a lot more straightforward and simple: Beak-Beak (the dog) and Tommynaut (the human-like alien) go into outer space to search for an element that will save their home planet, crash land on a different planet, and then enter a mysterious building called Armikrog in order to flee a giant carnivorous monster. The deeper the spaceman and dog travel into Armikrog, they uncover another mystery that I’ll also avoid describing because of spoilers, but is ultimately a lot more straight-forward and can be easily figured out due to the repetition of certain symbols and mechanics early in the game.  

The repetition of mechanics in Armikrog is a double-edged sword. The Neverhood didn’t have puzzles or objects with the same abundance of similarity. While you had a limited way of interacting with the objects within the game world, the way you interacted with them was always different. Although this sounds like what you’d most want out of an adventure game, this is what made The Neverhood so difficult since as you progressed, nothing ever became familiar.

Armikrog falls prey to the other edge of the sword, and possesses mechanics that are so familiar they become absolutely predictable. Every time I made it to a new area I basically had a checklist: I needed to find this particular NPC, do this with Beak-Beak, get this object, insert it into this other object, do the thing that unlocks the door, and then move on. I can’t help but feel like there was potential in how the characters interacted with their environment that was lost because the developers went for this level of simplicity.

You’ll also run into the occasional red-herring, which seems like part of a puzzle, but ultimately isn’t. You’ll find yourself in a certain room with a certain button that does a certain thing when you press it. That button goes unused throughout the entire game. Instead, Tommynaut will press it automatically during a cutscene, and you will just sit there feeling steamed. 

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Finally, for all the effort the development team took to fine tune the gameplay, there’s still a reasonable amount of puzzle-solving tactics you have to deploy that come directly out of the 1990s. This is a game that will suggest you make multiple previous save files. It’s impossible to screw up so bad that you’ll render the game unwinnable, but it helps to save just after every puzzle so you won’t spend too much time looking for things you should have completed in earlier rooms.

A lot of the puzzles use abstract, arcane-looking hieroglyphics that force you to (gasp of horror) write and draw on a piece of paper in order to remember later. While the 2-D artists who worked on these wall-scrawlings did their damndest to keep them simple, the sheer number of them will give even the most engaged puzzle fiend a slight case of writer’s cramp and/or eye strain. One was so complex that I actually took a screenshot of it and printed it out so I’d have it on hand to solve the accompanying puzzle.  These symbols also change every time you re-start with a new game, which is once again why saving is so important.

Oh, and have I mentioned the backtracking? Yeah, there’s backtracking. For one section you’ll need to travel around the entirety of what you’ve already explored, round-trip, in order to write down the symbols you’ll need to complete the final puzzle. No surprise that this puzzle comes very close to the end of the game. It certainly makes the entire experience a LOT longer.

Keep in mind that a good deal of my own criticism is based on the fact I once played a very limited run PC game in the far-away era of 1996. If you’ve never had the opportunity to play The Neverhood, I’m sure you’ll overlook a good deal of what I’ve pointed out, and you’ll experience a title as unique as the one I experienced once upon a time. You should, however, take a nugget of advice from an old-timer like me: you’ll have to deal with more than one frustration when playing this game, despite the finely sculpted graphics. 

Armikrog is currently available on PC via Steam. PS4 and Wii U versions of the game have been announced for a TBA release date. The full campaign lasts roughly between 6 to 8 hours without use of a walkthrough, and doesn’t change in terms of gameplay, except for certain symbol-based puzzles. If you already own the PC version, there will be no need to buy the consoles.  

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