You can hold ZR to surface, but for whatever reason Annika bob’s in the water as though there’s some invisible hand is taking hold of her head and holding it under. Until you get the item from the Ocean Dungeon that allows you to stay underwater for longer periods, falling in is basically a death sentence. ![]() Honestly, it probably would have been less frustrating if the developer had just taken the easy way out and made it so that water was inaccessible or resulted in instant death. Giraffe and Annika has some of the worst swimming controls I’ve encountered in a video game. Your propensity to roam isn’t helped by the fact that, while inside a dungeon, there’s no map or journal and it’s therefore sometimes difficult to tell what needs to be done or where you need to go.Īnd then there’s water. Otherwise, you’re just walking, walking, walking. There’s some presence of box pushing to create viable pathways and those boxes slide across the ground as if they’d been buttered. This, too, is dull, as all Annika can do is walk past enemies. Inside of dungeons is a kind of puzzle platforming section where you avoid ghosts, who will damage you on contact, and go from point A to point B. ![]() ![]() As a result, you get a bland, empty world. She’s only good for a smile and a nod the first time you met her, after which she’ll repeat the same line of text-much like everyone else. The most entertaining character to me was the game-saving NPC, Mrs Save, who looks like a child’s art project. They’ll give you generic fetch quests to move the story along and that’s their entire purpose. Outside of the limited number of dungeons, you’ll encounter a handful of strange characters, all of whom are certainly whimsical, but not all that interesting. Most of the time spent with Giraffe and Annika consists of walking around the world, whether in dungeons or out of them. Story isn’t the strongest aspect of Giraffe and Annika, particularly early on where everything just seems arbitrary. That’s really all the explanation you get for visiting these hazardous locations initially, and for whatever reason Annika is willing to do it for someone who, at least to her knowledge, she’s meeting for the first time. From there, you meet Giraffe, the other titular character, who asks you to gather shards from the three dungeons found in this world because he’s the only one on this world who can’t get past the barriers protecting them and you can. During this time, I picked up apples and pumpkins from a garden, just because, and found a rucksack that triggered a memory of a faceless woman creating it as a gift for someone who is heavily alluded at being Annika. When you start, you’re immediately given free roam of the area, during which you’ll stumble upon a house belonging to a woman named Lily. In Giraffe and Annika, you play as a young cat-eared girl named Annika, who awakens with no memory (per the usual hero archetype of games originating from Japan) in a whimsical world full of scenic sights and ghosts. It’s the studio’s very first title and it made it’s debut on PC a year ago before finding its way to console. Giraffe and Annika is a 3D adventure game by developer Atelier Mimina. Now that I’ve spent some time with Giraffe and Annika, I can confidently answer these questions. In any case, I didn’t order the box set because I had a niggling feeling that my gut is seldom wrong. The trailer left me with more questions than it answered: what is the gameplay like outside of the rhythm mini-game? Does it control as stiffly as it looks? Is the world open or rife with invisible barriers? I knew from their newsletter that there would be collectables (and community designed ones, no less), which adds some longevity to the core gameplay, but that was about it. I remember when I first saw Giraffe and Annika on the NIS America website, where I like to buy collector’s edition box sets of video games that catch my attention.
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