Guayota seeks to shed light on the history and culture of the Canary Islands. This caused me pause for thought. I realised I don’t know anything about the Canary Islands, other than that flocks of British tourists often migrate to Tenerife. Sadly, the Canary Islands has a few brutal periods in its history. Most prominent being its conquest by the Spanish. The age of exploration was underwritten in blood, and the native islanders, the Guanche, are the ones that paid the price. Soon, their culture and languge began to fade.
Guayota filters this through a local legend, the island of Saint Brendan, with a Lovecraftian lens. A great evil lurks within a set of temples and the natives carved murals to keep people away. As expected, the new arrivals scratched their catholicism all over them. To dig into all this, we need to solve a big collection of puzzles. These are definitely the highlight. They’re smart and, for the most part, enjoyable. There’s only one fly in this soup and it’s a strange one: The Legend of Zelda.
Mythical Mysteries
Guayota‘s story opens with a ragtag crew sailing to the mythical island of Saint Brendan, named after the monk who supposedly first landed there. Apparently, it’s an island you can only get to if you’re not trying to get there. So we do the only rational thing: go to sleep in the middle of the ocean. If it works, it works. Once we wake up, we’re on the sandy shores of Saint Brendan’s island. Guayota really does make it look good. Everything is in smooth, bright colours. It doesn’t look far off a paradise.
A bit of a shame, then, that ninety percent of our playtime is spent in dark, underground labyrinths. It fits the Lovecraftian theming, I suppose, but a few more outdoor areas would have made better use of the graphics on display. Still, being locked underground isn’t too bad if we get some interesting puzzles out of it. In fact, Guayota‘s major mechanic comes directly from wandering around underground. Our torch gets blown out but we’re rescued by a peculiar spirit, who allows us to see into an ethereal dimension.
The switch between the two influences which puzzles we get. The ‘light’ world tends to favour traps, which I’ll get to in a moment, while the ‘dark’ world is more of a classic puzzler. The puzzles are really rather good. They begin with a simple idea, such as lighting up stones to unlock doors, and gradually escalate from there. They strike the right balance when it comes to difficulty. Not too easy, so you can’t breeze through, but not so hard that you can’t solve them eventually. There’s a fair few of them, too. I did find myself getting trapped a couple of times, thanks to the dash mechanic, but this sort of thing can be fixed in updates.
Quite The Puzzler
The strength of Guayota‘s puzzles lie in the simplicity of its core mechanics. Each of the first three temples introduce new mechanics, and put them through their paces, but the real treats come with the fourth temple, where they all start to blend. For example, there’s a type of red stone that can do two things: split lasers into four, and explode, which can light torches. Lasers can explode them, so the final puzzles come down to constantly turning your thinking upside down. They produced a good number of the coveted eureka moments.
That said, it begins to suffer when it brings in another of its main influences: The Legend of Zelda. See, the traps I mentioned before are things like spinning blades and arrow traps. Though, in this case, they fire water to extinguish your torches. I very much dislike these traps. They feel remarkably cheap for a game with otherwise enjoyable puzzles. They make it hard to think. I enjoy crossword puzzles. I wouldn’t enjoy them if someone was pelting me with cricket balls after every solve.
What’s more, after three hits, we get dumped from the light world into the dark one. These aren’t without some cheap tricks; it’s got a love for invisible walls. The lack of traps, though, means we can appreciate the beauty of the puzzles. The dark world is like a slightly more complex version of the light world puzzle, which I thought was a good idea. Leave the traps for the action fans. To get the full experience though, you need to beat all light and dark puzzles. I had little desire to repeat a difficult puzzle, but in a more annoying fashion.
Guayota – Great Puzzles, Poor Traps
Still, Guayota had enough good ideas to keep me pressing on. Take the murals, for example. To uncover the mystery of the island, we need to solve the puzzles, whereupon our hero copies down the murals he sees at the end. The dark world shows the original, Guanche mural, while the light world shows the version the monks altered. Together they begin piecing together the true picture. It’s a neat way of linking together gameplay and story.
Truthfully, I think the Zelda influence was a misstep. An ingredient that hasn’t spoiled the meal but has dulled down the flavours a bit. It’s a damn shame because it’s an interesting setting that yields up some excellent puzzles, with some nice Lovecraftian drizzle on top. If Guayota had stopped there, I’d be singing its praises from the rooftop. As it was, I ended up just focusing on the dark world puzzles. I won’t say what the resultant ending was, but remember this is a Lovecraft story. Those don’t usually end with our hero in a laughing freeze-frame as the credits roll.
