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Genre: Adventure Developer & Publisher: Amanita Design Released: October 7, 2019 Requirements: OS: Windows 7 or higher Processor: 2 Ghtz Intel Core i5 Memory: 4 GB Graphics: Any detected GPU Storage: 800 MB available space
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Genre: Adventure Developer & Publisher: Amanita Design Released: October 7, 2019 Requirements: OS: Windows 7 or higher Processor: 2 Ghtz Intel Core i5 Memory: 4 GB Graphics: Any detected GPU Storage: 800 MB available space
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By flotsam Pilgrims Amanita Design Hailing from the independent Czech developer that brought us Machinarium, Creaks and the Samarost games amongst others, Pilgrims is a short, playful adventure that fits their “surreal worlds, light-hearted humour and hand-crafted appeal” reputation. It came out in 2019, but like so many games it passed me by at the time. I found it lurking in my library and it seemed to meet my desired ‘what to play next’ mood. I couldn’t have been more pleased. The game starts at a poker game, but there is nothing to do at that point but to enjoy the little drawn figures as they go about winning and losing. When it changes to a blue tent in a woodland clearing, it's time to get involved. Very quickly you will have access to a map, which is how you move about. Featuring a top-down perspective, you click a destination and then watch as your tiny figure makes his way there. Across the course of the game you will progressively accumulate three more companions, at which time a little procession will be making its way about. Not all of the map is available to you at first. You are confined to the bottom left corner, which gives you a limited number of locations to help you get things sorted out. It shouldn’t take you too long though to convince the bandit to let you pass, at which time the whole map is available, and you are free to go wherever you might want. Whilst they travel as a pack, each character is playable at every destination. Each is represented by a playing card, which sits at the bottom part of the screen. Drag the desired playing card into the game world to utilise that character, then choose from the various items you might have gathered to see how he or she might use them. Those items are also represented by cards, and again you just drag them into the world to use them. I don’t recall any occasion where I tried to use an item and nothing happened. It may not have been elaborate, but some little animated antic would occur. And if they were more elaborate, many of those were just for fun, as opposed to being the ‘necessary’ interaction. I say necessary advisedly. While you have to achieve certain things, how you achieve them can be extremely open. Indeed, the lack of a single path through the game is one of its strengths, and the jolliness of doing stuff encourages experimentation with your various characters. I have already mentioned that certain interactions occur just for fun, and they can be rather funny, so the number of ways in which you might e.g., retrieve the broom makes trying things worth it. I appreciate that this is not immediately apparent from within the game; a solve might reasonably be thought to be the only solve. There is though much on the Steam page that refers to finding different solutions, and you can take it from me that it’s best enjoyed with an ‘open’ mindset. I tend to get frustrated by obscure solves; here I was motivated to just try something else. It bears that quirky Amanita visual style, and sounds as good as it looks. Information is imparted though little pictograms (the spoken word being unintelligible to me) and they work well. I generally had an objective or two in mind, but even when I was lost (and it can be a tad directionless) I just went somewhere else and hit something different with my broom. It isn’t all jolly hockey-sticks. There is a Grimm-ness to various elements, that makes it all the more enjoyable. Achievements are accumulated and are again represented by cards. I have about half of the 45 available after my first play through. Additional achievements will be the result of solving things differently, or doing things I didn’t do. Starting again carries over my achievement deck, and should I want to complete it I will need to play it again more than once. The game saves automatically (no manual saves) and took me about two hours the first time. It is a worthy addition to the Amanita stable. I played on: OS: Windows 11, 64 Bit Processor: Intel i7-9700K 3.7GHz RAM: Corsair Dominator Platinum RGB DDR4 32GB Video card: AMD Radeon RX 580 8192MB
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