The video game Creaks by Amanita Design* is a great game to play if you like puzzles!  The premise is, you’ve just found an entire secret mansion in a cave underneath your house.  As you explore, you have to solve puzzles to get through all the rooms of the house while avoiding the giant monster lurking above and the various traps left by the owner.

I’ve played a couple other games by Amanita Design, such as Samorost and Machinarium, and what I was really looking for in Creaks was the same amazing background art style, the clever puzzle composition, and the slightly eerie character design.  I certainly wasn’t disappointed as they had all that and more in this great new game.

All of the backgrounds in the various rooms were so intricately detailed that you could look at them for hours and still find something new.  Sometimes small things will move or shift around behind you which adds little, fun Easter eggs throughout the game, and the fact that all of the rooms look so cluttered really completes the idea that the house you’re exploring is very old.  The puzzles you solve as you move through the house are a nice balance of being difficult, but not so difficult that you can’t solve it or get too frustrated while trying to.  Like in Samorost, there are little bonus items to collect and minigames to play that give your mind a break from solving things, since the entire game is puzzle based.

Because Amanita Design has such a distinct style, I was really excited to play this game as I knew there would be new characters and I especially enjoyed how the enemies were designed.  Each character has a very spookily enchanting look about them.  I also appreciated that the clothes the main character is wearing (in the picture above) are drawn in such detail right down to the knit pattern in their sweater vest!  This may be a bit macabre, but I also really liked all the death animations in this game.  Every time your character dies, there’s a rotating set of animations that show how you’ve been attacked, but in a goreless, silhouetted way.  The animations also vary judging by what attacked you.  Overall, I think this game is a lot of fun, and if you’re looking for a spooky game to keep you busy, this is the one for you!

*This game can currently be played on the Nintendo Switch, Apple Arcade, PS4, Xbox One, and Microsoft Windows.

Wikipedia, Amanita Design, 15 July 2020, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creaks#/media/File:Creax_Box_Art.jpg. Accessed 8 Dec. 2021.