Meet The Krewe

Last week I bought four new games so it was a racing certainty I'd end up downloading something else for free and playing that instead. This is why I so rarely pay money for anything - games, music, books, movies, tv shows - the very act of handing over the cash seems to guarantee the universe will feel duty-bound to let me know I could have had something just as good - or even better - for nothing.

In this case, the something in question turned out to be so peculiarly unlikely, I don't think there's any way I could have anticipated it. I was checking Feedly, as I do many times a day, being as addicted, in my fashion, to certain, relatively obscure forms of social media as any GenZer to their TikTok feed, when this popped up.

Artifact Krewe, available on itch.io for the extremely appealing price of no money at all, is "a Guild Wars 2 fangame, not associated with it". Wrap your head around that, if you can. It's also "a treasure hunt game taking place in a colorful world". Now you know that, you know pretty much everything the game's storefront has to tell you, other than the developer's name - Skrool.  

Skrool seems to have made just this one game. The only link on the "About" page goes to a Twitter account going by the name of "Not Really Skrool" that's been "temporarily restricted... because there has been some unusual activity from this account.

It seems that being restricted by Twitter doesn't actually stop people seeing what you've got to say; it just means anyone who wants to find out what that is has to click the equivalent of a "proceed at your own risk" warning. I clicked, so now I can tell you that Skrool "exists". And that's about all I got from Skrool's profile.

A scan of the recent timeline reveals that Skrool has been working on the game "these last years" and... er... that's about it. Diligent research on my part (I clicked on the link to Skrool's Tumblr, perhaps significantly named It's Really Skrool, although perhaps not, since there's another Tumblr just called Skrool) reveals that the game has actually taken two years to complete. 

Having had work in the Peacemaker Calendar of 1335AE, Skrool would appear to be very active in the creative side of GW2 fandom, an aspect of the game I've been aware of for a long time but rarely felt the need to pay much attention uintil now. On the evidence presented, Asurans and their culture would seem to be Skrool's main focus.

That's something I'm sure everyone reading this who's ever played GW2 must have worked out for themselves already, just from the name of the game. According to the GW2 wiki, "krewe", with that idiosyncratic spelling, refers to Asuran "work gangs or limited single task corporate entities" although the word itself has clearly been borrowed from the carnival traditions of Louisiana and nearby regions, where it refers to "a social organization that stages parades and/or balls for the Carnival season".

Whatever its provenance, Artifact Krewe is a fine divertissement. After reading about it on MassivelyOP, I immediately downloaded the game, which arrives in a neat zip file that unpacks to take up just over a gigabyte of hard drive space. For that, you get a lush, vibrant, colorful world in which to enjoy some very gentle, relaxing and curiously satisfying gameplay.

There's no character creation beyond giving your Asura a name. Pick something you don't mind seeing repeatedly because every NPC will use it as extensively while talking to you, as if they'd just come back from a weekend's residential marketing course. 

If the game has a weak point - and it's hardly even that - it would be the dialog, which often reads as though it's been written by someone for whom English is not a first language. Coming of the back of Noah's Heart, however, that feels like a churlish observation to make. Both the meaning and tone are always eminently clear, which puts the text well above many other supposedly professional games I've played lately.

Other than that, I really can't fault it. As well as looking gorgeous Artifact Krewe sounds charming and plays smoothly. I found the controls intuitive and comfortable. It was easy to work out what to do and how to do it. Movement feels fluid and expressive, although the woozy sweep of the camera could induce motion sickness in the sensitive.

The mechanics of locating and unearthing artefacts, using a device whos acronym escapes me for the moment, are simple and straightforward. Rather than cluttering up your inventory, each artifact found adds itself to a list as you look for clues to lead you to the lost laboratory of the celebrated but mysterious Vixx.

In the fairly short time I had to play I found half a dozen items, some buried in the ground, others on crops of rock only accessible by way of some light, GW2 vista style platforming. There was one that turned out to be concealed behind a locked door, openable only by rolling a large rock onto a pressure plate. The puzzles felt like fun. Nothing was difficult or annoying. 

"Fun" pretty much sums up what I've seen of the game so far. The whole experience is sun-drenched, celebratory and bright. It may be that the tasks and challenges get harder, later but somehow I doubt it. There's no combat in the game and it feels very much modeled on those whimsical, joyous, almost childlike events GW2 was known for in its earliest days. 

For someone who remembers the game as it was back then, it doesn't feel so much like a tribute as a reminder of what could have been. Right now, I'd rather play Artifact Krewe than log in to the game that inspired it.