Breaking the mould
When you’re creating a game using stop-motion animation, you can’t afford to run at 60 frames per second. The standard rate for point-and-click games is a steady 30 frames; adhering to the new industry standard of 60 frames per second literally doubles the workload. But Armikrog actually looks better for running in 30 frames, because of the way it’s presented. Character animations seem stronger and more solid, and the hyper-realism of the tracking takes away from the more detached impressions videogames like Armikrog try to achieve.
Anyone who played The Neverhood could appreciate how unique the game looked: the mixed media canvases played host to some surreal and bizarre creations, all supported by one of the most left-field soundtracks we’ve heard in gaming. Armikrog is a spiritual successor to The Neverhood (a cursory glance at its main character will tell you that), and as such, the entire creative team has been re-hired for this new project.
It’d be easy to simply call the game claymation, but Armikrog is a lot more than that. While the main body of the game is built and animated with clay and stop frames, the developers are keen to also include puppet fabrication methods and other media to achieve their specific look and feel.
In Armikrog, you’ll follow intrepid space explorer Tommynaut through a nonsense land of madness and intrigue, followed by a blind (and incredibly verbal) dog-thing named Beak-Beak. There’ll be plenty of colourful characters to meet, and players will face a series of fiendish puzzles that’ll tease the left-hand side of your brain.
Interestingly, the game is made ‘straight through’, which means all the animation and design work is done chronologically, so the developers can’t go back and alter any elements after they’ve committed. It’s a difficult challenge – and one that means the team absolutely has to know what it’s doing at every stage – but one that should ultimately pay off: the stop-motion style really adds something special and peculiar.
We got a little hands-on with the game during the introduction section, where you’re tasked with breaking out of the eponymous Armikrog, and it is simply a matter of clicking on everything. Tommynaut will interact with objects (more often than not, they’re the ones you least expect) and then you must mix those items with other interactive elements to see what happens.
It seems like standard point-and-click fare at first, but it quickly begins to get obscure. This is a game for people that love pulling on every thread they can find, in the hope of finding a solution to a problem that’s been bugging them for days.