By Liyo Kikon
EVERY game is created by a team of artists with the same vision and it is truly astonishing when a game like Samorost 3 comes to form since it will take a group of really great artists to create such a unique, beautiful and weird game!
I have to emphasise the word ‘weird’ because that is really what the game feels like when you start to play it. Once the game starts, you are greeted with a beautiful grassland and a sort of lighthouse in the middle. Instantly, you can appreciate the beautiful artwork and all the little details they have put into the game. The art in this game look like they are combined using multiple photographs, but on closer examination, they are actually hand painted and it is simply amazing to see just how much work they must have put into each scene of the game. Our main character comes out of his house upon hearing a thud and we find that it is a blow horn. This blow horn is our main interactive object throughout the game, it works by tapping/clicking on certain objects which helps our character to listen to the sound and replicate it, thereby solving puzzles. I love the art style, even though some scenes have a kind of double meaning and all scenes look really weird with the planets in the shape of floating trees, enormous musical insects, funny looking characters and to top it all, a space ship which is retrofitted with a bottle, a bathtub and a strange gaseous mushroom as its engine.
At the core, this is a puzzle-adventure game but there are no dialogue of any kind and most of the time, you will be presented with a puzzle to solve without any hints or clues. This makes for a very interesting game since you have to observe little details in the game and use those observations to think your way out of certain areas. For example, in one of the area, a strange mushroom picking hermit presents you with a set of cards and a kind of box for placing individual cards. Each card has some drawings on it, such as hunters, animals, fire, pond. At first, it is rather confusing since we don’t know what to do with that information, but after fiddling with it for a while, I found out that the cards interact with each other upon placing them in the boxes. With this idea, all that was left was to re-arrange the cards and figure out the puzzle. In certain areas, some kind of spirits appear and give you clues to help you get through them. But again, you will need to pay close attention to the hints to understand them. All the puzzles and challenges in this game can be easily solved and I found that none of them became tough even in the advanced levels, they were all unique and this kept the game interesting and obviously, like most puzzle games, the satisfaction of solving a puzzle can be quite pleasing.
I was playing this game without a headphone at first, but I did not know that I was missing out on one of the best parts of the game – the sound. If you are playing this game, I would highly recommend you to put on your favourite headphones because the sounds in this game is really immersive and weird, but in a good way. There are some psychedelic background music and you can also mix the beat upto a certain extent from the settings menu. But apart from the background music, I observed that most of the sounds are created using voices, for example, you can clearly make out that the barking of the dog is actually a guy saying “woof! woof!” but it is done in such a cute manner that it actually works well. And like the dog, most of the sounds are done vocally, such as wooshes and other subtle sounds. Not to give out any spoilers, but you will surely love the three salamanders singing in one of the areas, I loved it so much that I stayed in that area to listen to the entire song.
The overall pace of the game is very slow-going, and this game requires patience and a whole lot of thinking. This game was originally released on pc, but it has been made available on Mac OS and iOS as well, with android version coming soon. If you love beautiful games or you are a fan of puzzle-adventure titles, I highly recommend this game since it is one of the most unique games available.
