Stay On The Path, Snufkin!

In direct contrast with yesterday's demo, Snufkin: Melody of Moominvalley gives excellent screenshots. Taking its visual cues from Tove Janson's original illustrations, you can pretty much point the camera anywhere and get a poster. 

At least, you can in the excellent, atmospheric introduction. Once you get into the game itself, or the portion available in the demo, things start to look a lot more video-gamey. That's not to say they don't still look elegant and attractive; just more in the way you'd expect from a puzzler-platformer intended for small children. 

It took me forty minutes to play through the demo. I spent maybe five or ten minutes enjoying the scenery as the game took me through an extended cut scene involving Snufkin saying goodbye to Moomintroll for the winter, followed by a montage of the seasons changing before the inevitable and much wished-for return of Spring.

Honestly, I could have taken a lot more of that. The visuals were delightful. The specially commissioned soundtrack by Sigur Ros was soothing. The whole thing would have made a wonderful screensaver, back in the day when animated screensavers were still a thing.

Eventually, though, we came to the game. And it wasn't bad. It wasn't very interesting but it certainly wasn't bad. As seems all too common with the demos I play in Steam Next Fests, this one seems to be just the opening of the game, including the tutorial. 

I'm increasingly of the opinion that excising the opening half-hour of your game and slapping "Demo" on the front isn't the best way to drum up customers. The set-up and instructions are rarely the most compelling gameplay any game has to offer. It would be worrying if they were. Demos, like the one for Stray Gods, that have been specially constructed to show off the game's strengths, seem to me to be much more likely to result in wishlistings and pre-orders than yet another trudge through a tutorial and a few introductory quests.

Speaking of tutorials, the mechanics here are simple enough although the controls are a bit odd. "S" for Use Object is certainly non-standard as is "Q" to open the quest journal. "A" for Play Harmonica is weird, too, but that's what happens when you choose click-to-move over WASD, I guess.

It doesn't matter much because gameplay moves at such a sedate pace there's time to re-orient yourself when muscle memory pulls your finger the wrong way. I thought about checking to see if keys were rebindable but there didn't seem to be much point since I was already getting comfortable with the ones I'd been given.

The initial action, such as it is, consists of very typical tasks like picking up rocks to make stepping stones to cross streams and moving logs for the same purpose. Early on you meet a Small Creature, too insignificant to have a name. Inevitably, you agree to come up with one for them. That's your first quest or task or mission. I forget the correct terminology.

It's also straight out of the books, as is the main "villain" of the piece, who turns out to be... no, I won't spoil it, although it's right there in the description on the Steam page so I don't think it's supposed to be a secret. If you're familiar with the world of Moominvalley you'll probably have an idea who it might be when I tell you the bulk of your time in the demo will be spent uprooting signs, pushing over statues and pulling down railings.

All of which, of course, is entirely in keeping with Snufkin's moral philosophy. He's not one for rules isn't our Snufkin. The mechanics of preventing Moominvalley from being turned from wilderness into parkland involve some fairly straighforward stealthing - hiding in bushes, matching the timing of guards on patrol, that kind of thing - with some rather more unusual solutions to puzzles, like getting birds to fly into guards to stun them.

Much of this is achieved by playing the harmonica, an action whose effectiveness relies on Snufkin's one and only stat, Inspiration. Every relevant creature has a rating that has to be matched or surpassed by Snufkin's Inspiration for his (Really rather tuneless.) harmonica-playing to have any effect. 

Increasing your Inspiration stat provides the only form of character progression available in the demo and can be achieved by running through bushes or getting birds to fly through them. Apparently the bushes are stuffed with inspiration. How or why beats me.

Playing the harmonica also acts like the Pied Piper's pipe on occasion. There's a sequence where you have to find and return three ducklings to a duck, which you do by blowing your harp. Naturally, when the mother duck is re-united with her progeny, she gets off her nest to reveal a key because that's just how life is.

Well, that's how life is in video games, which is unmistakeably what this is. I was hoping for something a lot more like a visual novel using the Moomin lore but you don't always get what you want.

I'm very glad to have played the demo. Thanks to the experience I'm going to remove the game from my wishlist, which probably wasn't quite the reaction the developers were hoping for. It's not that I think this is going to be a bad game. It's more that I was bored before I got halfway through the demo. I don't think it's for me.

I was expecting something a bit different. The Store page calls Snufkin: Melody of Moominvalley "an ambient and wholesome experience for both kids and adults" that "combines open world-mechanics with puzzles, stealth and melodic elements." It's not entirely misleading but there was altogether too much focus on the action for my taste. I'd have preferred considerably more ambience and a lot less of the rest, personally.

As for the "open world" part, I found my enjoyment of that somewhat diminished by having to pick up rocks or hop from ledge to ledge every few steps just to get from one place to another. It reminded me of the old jibe about golf being a good walk, spoiled. Sometimes you just want to walk through pretty countryside without having to play a game to do it. Moominvally has proper paths. I don't see why Snufkin can't just use those.

Anyway, I'm sure it'll be great fun for its target audience, which would appear to be very small children. Or possibly it ramps up as you get further in and develops some kind of narrative worthy of the source material, which is a lot darker and weirder than this would have you believe. 

I'm very sorry Little My didn't make an appearance in the demo since she's (Predictably.) my favorite character but I don't think I'd be inclined to jump through whatever gameplay hoops are required to get far enough along to meet her.

I'm not writing the game off entirely but I'll wait for the reviews. Or maybe I might enjoy watching someone play it on YouTube more than I'd enjoy playing it myself. That's always an option these days.