Often games try to test your patience by holding a slower pace than others, these games usually win you over with their storyline, puzzles or some other interesting gameplay loop. The polish game Rauniot has none of that, it’s just slow.
In simple words, it is just gówno!
Excuse me, what?
The story throws us headfirst into the action, and right away, I can tell you there was a lot of potential. We play as Aino in search of her husband in the nuclear fallout post-apocalyptic Poland of Rauniot.
Our character experiences many nightmares every time they either go to sleep or get knocked out. In these nightmares, Aino is seen killing her husband, and there are also some glimpses of a disfigured newborn child.
(won’t go into detail as that would be spoiler territory.)
Here’s how to mess it up
Characters stand with a weird zoom to their faces, and they portray the story through robotic conversations with each other. Not flinching, not moving, just standing still and staring as their mouths slowly and painfully reciting their lines. The dialogue itself has a lot of long uninterrupted useless information that goes on and on and on….
There is this one funny scene where a guy draws you a pic of a man you need to find. It is not a sketch of a man nor a drawing of a face but an almost stickman-esqe drawing of an entire person. At first I thought our character would make fun of it but instead she acknowledges the picture. It is all beyond hilarious stuff.
From okay to infuriating
It is the usual affair of a point and click game where we walk around clicking on things to get information, hear dialogue and solve puzzles(if you can call put thing in thing, puzzles).
Now this polish game is very beautiful and there are some great moments worth filming but at points it interferes with the interaction element of the game.
For example: there was a moment I completely missed a rolled up piece of dark grey rope because it was set inside a shadow that itself is dark grey. I had crossed this place many times and only realised it was there after I consulted a walkthrough online. Even then it was hard to pinpoint.
This happens multiple times throughout the game and it is infuriating each time.
I could talk for hours on everything that messed with me in my playthrough of Rauniot but that would just remind me of the pain I had to suffer.
The head guard
There is one scene which I remembered from the trailer of Rauniot at a gaming awards show. The scene has you tied to a chair and you have to drag yourself to retrieve an item.
Let me run you through what I had to endure.
When my character wakes up, I take a look at the surroundings. I find two interactables, a shelf and a door. I clicked the shelf, after 6 real life seconds, Aino made her way to the shelf. She kicked and the shelf did nothing.
Next, I went outside of the door. When the game loaded, I saw stairs. I clicked the stairs and she decided to jump. After a hideous cutscene, where she hit her head and snapped her neck, the game resets back to the room.
Okay so that was wrong. Now I realised I can also kick the door. Combine that with the shelf, I managed to get a helmet down. Which landed right on my characters head.
Despite my queries that such a thing should not work, I chose to take the stair jump again. This time with a helmet. It worked!
Why do I tell you this?
Well, because it was painfully slow and in the end all I felt was stupid.
This should give an idea of what this polish game has on offer.
The good
Honestly I can say this game has some good. Like the fact, if you walk through a room once, the next time you click on the door, it will just take you to the other side instead of having to walk over. Also you can open a map and teleport to any location that you have previously been to and characters don’t repeat the same lines every time you meet them.
These are some really nice features, such a pity they find themselves in a game like this one.
I would suggest other game devs to take inspiration from this Polish game and make use of these features before any idiot decides to patent it.
Gówno!
So yes, this sad game about sad people doing sad things for sad reasons ends up making you feel a little too sad.
I mean, the red flag was up when the game told me that an item of use cannot be carried until that use is obvious.
So if you were an individual who seemed interested in a point and click adventure… Well, Here is what a polish man would say:
“Są o wiele lepsze opcje. Nie marnuj pieniędzy na to!”
