II: Greak: Memories of Azur

Recommended by: friend-of-the-polycule Sabera

Greak is a 2021...Metroidvania? Kinda? from Mexican studio Navegante, and it's their only game to date. For starters, it's absolutely fucking gorgeous, with every area being beautifully hand-drawn, several full traditionally-animated cutscenes, just, an absolute marvel graphically. The reason that I say that it's technically a Metroidvania is that it does gate some progression behind upgrades, but also a lot of progression behind story triggers, and there's very little "oh now that I have a double jump I can..." to be had. Very little in Greak is optional. It's a very tight, very short game.

Greak's How Long To Beat page says 6.5 hours, and that seems about right; my Steam playtime says 7.2 hours and some of that was spent with it idling talking to Sabera about it. The buried lede, which I did not know at the time, is that Sabera is the world-record holder in both any% and 100%, and ran Greak at GDQ. So, yeah, this is a game she's intimately familiar with. This made a lot of our conversations about it extremely funny, and shaped like "hey, I think I did this puzzle in an unintended way" + "oh I wouldn't know, I skip that entire area with a damage boost".

Greak, mechanically, is very similar to Trine, in that you're controlling, by the end of the game, three different family members with different abilities, being able to move them as a group or independently. This mostly works for me, though having three playable characters kinda definitionally means you're doing some amount of retracing to get them all in the same place. The only way it extremely doesn't work for me is that the characters you aren't controlling continue to have hitboxes even when you aren't controlling them, so, for instance, jumping over an attack means clearing it with all three characters, or one whose health bar you can't even see at the moment might get hit. And, of course, if any one of them dies that's game. This led to at least a couple of annoying deaths from getting a character that was at one hp getting clipped by something that I had avoided, but overall, the game isn't really onerous about having three controllable characters. (I watched Sabera's GDQ run after finishing the game, and learned that the speedrun community has agreed to use the "uncontrolled characters are invincible" accessibility option just because it reduces the RNG layer of "a character you left standing on a switch did or didn't have something spawn next to them and try to eat them")

When Greak is firing on all cylinders, it really works. The final area, which splits the party and forces you (at least when done as intended) to engage with every party member both individually and in every possible pair, is really excellent. Unfortunately the game just kinda...ends after that; the six hour runtime leaves precious little game left to actually bake with all three characters, every upgrade, etc. I think this game could easily have been eight hours instead of six and been a better game for it, but it reminds me of Owlboy in that way: I suspect that every extra hour of game would have cost an untold amount of graphics and animation budget that a small Mexican indie studio making their first game extremely did not have. So, I wish it were longer, and a bit less rough around the edges, but over, it's a perfectly cromulent if not stunning game. Probably a 3/5 for me.