Creaks takes you on a visit to a mysterious towering mansion, inhabited by eccentric avian folk and strange creatures, which may or may not be as dangerous as they seem. In their animated form, these monsters called creaks are deadly enemies you should always keep your distance from. However, as soon as you manage to trap them under a beam of light, they transform into harmless furniture that might be just as useful when you’re solving many of the game’s elaborate puzzles. Players will meet several types of creaks in the game, and each of them behaves differently - while dogs will chase you on sight and spies will copy or mirror your movement, the jellyfish-like creatures composedly patrol the area.

Inbetween individual levels and challenges, players will get to explore the house for a series of hand-crafted paintings, some of which were carefully hidden in discoverable secret rooms. About a third of the 35 collectible pieces are playable mini-games, taking on the role of little arcade cabinets in the aesthetic of 18th and 19th-century wall art.

For the first time, Amanita Design departs from their usual style of point-and-click gameplay and uses a more streamlined control scheme. Players will guide the hero directly using a directional pad or a thumbstick to descend deeper down the eerie house and interact with its many levers, pressure plates, bridges, and light switches.

A game inspired by the topics of ambiguity and pareidolia - the psychological phenomenon of “seeing things” - Creaks aims to surprise players with its diverse surreal environments, hand-drawn, hand-painted, and carefully animated, as well as refined puzzles. The visual art goes hand-in-hand with music from Brighton-based composer and multi-instrumentalist Joe Acheson, aka Hidden Orchestra. He delivered an eclectic score that adaptively changes based on your progression within each of the game’s levels and often drops the beat to celebrate the moment you finally figure it out. Instruments Joe used on this soundtrack, his first-ever work for a video game, are ranging from zithers and flutes to organs and choirs to modular synthesizers.

For the first time, Amanita Design departs from their usual style of point-and-click gameplay and uses a more streamlined control scheme. Players will guide the hero directly using a directional pad or a thumbstick...

Ugh!
Thanks for the warning.

What is a directional pad? Arrow keys on a keyboard?

Thank you Jenny, but it can be played with a keyboard though right?

Where is your review (I don't think it's on GB)?

The Czech studio Amanita Design and its permanent leader Jakub Dvorski are best known as the creators of their own subgenre of "self-righteous" - almost casual point-and-click adventure games in which each location is limited to one screen, after completing all the necessary actions, successively replacing neighboring ones. The local gameplay is reduced to solving puzzles by finding and using hot spots, and the inventory and dialogues are completely absent, and the lack of text is made up for by the communication of characters using pictograms or inarticulate speech, supplemented by atmospheric music. To all this, it is worth adding an unusual entourage and an original plot, characteristic of both the famous Machinarium and the later Botanicula , Samorost 3 orChuchel . Last year, the Czechs delighted their fans with only one short Pilgrims , but now they have finally presented a full-fledged large-scale project - a little different in terms of genre, but just as high-quality and exciting.

"Creaks" was announced back in 2018, and for a long time no details about this game were reported, so its significant difference from previous works of the studio came as a surprise to fans of Dvorsky's work and his colleagues. The adventure begins with a seemingly peaceful scene in the room of the protagonist - an unnamed young man, whom we see on our screen from a side perspective, as in Machinarium and Samorost. A young man is reading a book at the table, when suddenly everything around begins to shake, the light bulb burns out, and a hole opens in the back wall, leading to a whole underground city that turned out to be right below us - resembling a giant tree with numerous towers, stairs and passages and inhabited by intelligent bird-people (almost as in Aviary Attorney), But, unfortunately, not only by them. The word "Creaks" in the title is not translated anywhere, despite the declared support for seventeen languages, including Russian and Ukrainian (it turned out to be not difficult to implement such a translation, given that the text, traditionally for Amanita Design, is present only in the menu). However, “Squeaks” mean exactly the strange monsters found in this huge “birdhouse”: instantly killing the hero when approaching (which can always be avoided by climbing the stairs or in some other cunning way sneaking out of their field of vision), all local monsters, as it soon turns out, are mortally afraid of light - and when exposed to the rays from the lamp ... turn into motionless and even moderately useful wooden pieces of furniture.

The visual solution of the game differs mainly in dark tones, since the action takes place exclusively indoors, and even inside a huge and somewhat gloomy cave, with lighting for the most part electric and manually turned on only at the moments we need. But in terms of the thoroughness of drawing all the details of various interiors, Creaks just reminds all the same Machinarium and the Samorost family, including some of its surrealism; even in the most seemingly passable locations, the smallest elements of the picture are drawn with love by hand and are very pleasing to the eye. The gloomy surroundings of most of the levels are diluted with bright and colorful paintings hidden here and there, playing the role of optional "easter eggs" and even mini-games: more than three dozen of these works of art are stylized as European painting of the 18th century, - only with the same bird-people as characters. And, of course, the sound part is made at a traditionally high level: both the effects accompanying our actions and the musical design by the Scottish band Hidden Orchestra, who performed their works on a variety of instruments, from flute and organ to electronic synthesizers. For the band under the direction of Joe Acheson, this was the first experience in the field of creating a soundtrack for a video game, but it turned out to be quite successful for itself.

But in terms of the interface, Creaks has radically departed from the tradition of point-and-click in the direction of direct control: you can use both the keyboard and the gamepad, while the mouse is not even used in the menu. The hero moves around the screen using the arrow keys: most of the locations even resemble a classic "platformer" because of the several floors in the rooms and the stairs between them. The space bar will also be actively used, by itself activating various switches (for example, the same lamps), and in conjunction with the left and right arrows, allowing our protagonist to jump over small chasms or move furniture items. However, fortunately (for fans of adventure games) or unfortunately (for fans of real platformers), the arcade element in the game is not at all great: especially fast reaction is practically not required here, and although sometimes you will need to perform some actions for a while (for example, with switches, the effect of activation of which lasts only a few seconds), in case of failure you can always try to repeat them - and sooner or later achieve success. Even if the character "dies", when a monster is too close to meet, he immediately revives at almost the same point: in other words, we are facing not an arcade puzzle, but a logical puzzle that encourages thoughtful and unhurried study of locations by trial and error.

Actually, our task is to find a way out of the current screen (usually hidden behind one or another obstacle) - and move on to the next one, having managed not only to avoid monsters, but also to use them to our advantage (for example, forcing enemies to move to cells with switches built into the floor that activate the desired door or bridge). In total, on the way we will encounter several types of opponents - first one, after several levels (after we learn to handle this type of monsters well) another, often together with the previous one, and so on. The first such unfriendly animals are vicious metal dogs, recalling the same Machinarium; seeing the hero, they dash off and rush to him, striving to bite: they have to run away, climbing stairs inaccessible to them, - and at the same time trying to figure out how best it would be to deceive the stupid four-legged and penetrate the area it protects, where the necessary switch may be hidden. But as soon as we force this type of enemy to fall under the lamp, he instantly turns into a harmless stool! It looks at the same time funny and phantasmagoric, recalling Bertrand Russell's joke that tables behind our backs can turn into kangaroos ... But this creaky furniture can always be moved to a suitable place - of course, provided that it does not go beyond the lit plot, otherwise it will again turn into a toothy dog ​​(and will instantly eat us). how it instantly turns into a harmless stool! It looks at the same time funny and phantasmagoric, recalling Bertrand Russell's joke that tables behind our backs can turn into kangaroos ... But this creaky furniture can always be moved to a suitable place - of course, provided that it does not go beyond the lit plot, otherwise it will again turn into a toothy dog ​​(and will instantly eat us). how it instantly turns into a harmless stool! It looks at the same time funny and phantasmagoric, recalling Bertrand Russell's joke that tables behind our backs can turn into kangaroos ... But this creaky furniture can always be moved to a suitable place - of course, provided that it does not go beyond the lit plot, otherwise it will again turn into a toothy dog ​​(and will instantly eat us).

In the second ten levels, soaring jellyfish will be added to the dogs (or are they such stingrays? In any case, they are very painful with the current). Unlike the previous type of opponents, this enemy patrols the location regularly and leisurely, and we will need to build our actions based on an accurate understanding of the trajectory of their movement. After a while, a remote control will appear in our arsenal, allowing you to activate some switches from a distance. The next attraction turns out to be "double-spies", repeating all the actions of the protagonist, sometimes in a mirror image, but just as deadly when approaching them (but in fact, they are living clothes hangers). Finally, at the last levels, briskly jumping and nibbling goats await us, as well as the trunks of invisible elephants that play the role of water pipes:

The tasks of deceiving and distracting monsters and operating with switches (by the way, very well balanced in terms of complexity) are pleasantly diluted as with the already mentioned pictures and optional mini-games (which consist in the need to press the right buttons at the right time, like on arcade machines), so and especially the plot scenes. In between the multi-storey levels, we can also encounter walk-through locations with animated adventures from the life of birdmen. For it is during our stay in this tree-city that he is experiencing one of the most dramatic moments in his history, in which a young protagonist who accidentally wanders there will have to play a far from the last role ... In general, everything is quite original and interesting, - different from Amanita could not have waited. As for the duration of the passage, then this largely depends on your quick wits and quickness, but in general you will have to spend at least ten hours in Creaks, which will turn out to be quite pleasant for yourself. Definitely “Our Choice”!


ITC.UA RATING 5 stars
PROS: Original puzzles; detailed levels; surreal monsters that turn into pieces of furniture with a slight movement of the hand
CONS: No
CONCLUSION: The original puzzle, despite the authors' transition to "direct control" and to platform elements, did not lose the traditional quality of Amanita Design's work

Thanks Iurii and Ana! It sounds complicated.

Are there instructions regarding the controls? I just started Samorost 3 yesterday and had to repeat the whole first section because I could not figure out how to save the game.

Lex here is the google translate. My Google Chrome browser auto translates for me.
Thanks, Iurii. Great review!

Thanks, Ana!
Wow: "self-righteous" - that's how Google translated 'Samorost-like'