CARIMARA is an odd one. It’s one of those games that has an achievement for beating it in four minutes. So you know you’re in for a quick experience, and there’s always a danger that it’ll slip right out of your head as soon as it goes in. Not so with CARIMARA. I think it’ll stick with me. Part of that is the short, sharp emotional ending. Part of it is to do with how mad everything looks and feels. A third, bigger, part is that CARIMARA is stuffed with secrets.
It’s a tricky game to write about, without just blandly describing all the interesting bits. It’s also a tricky game to recommend, because the actual gameplay is mainly spent bumbling around clicking on things. I do like the central gameplay mechanic but, if I had to pick nits, I’d say that CARIMARA is too short to let it evolve. Still, it’s definitely worth a look. For the price of a sandwich, you can have an experience that’s pleasantly unpleasant.
Dealing Questions
I approached CARIMARA like it was a horror game, but I don’t think that’s quite right. Certainly there are horror elements, but it’s more like a vague unsettling feeling. Like you’re at a party and suddenly realise that you don’t want to be there, so you’re constantly looking for the exit. In this case, though, we’re here to talk to the dead. We’re a Carimara, a little goblin fella called in to exorcise the ghost living in an old lady’s cellar. As you might expect, it’s not quite as simple as that.
For one thing, our little fella cannot speak. Instead, he has a set of cards with different pictures on them. When he wants to ask a question, he holds up the card. Interacting with the environment generates new cards, which you can then slot into conversations to get more information. To finally exorcise the ghost, you need to figure out who it was, and how it died. That means poking all the way around the environment and piecing together the clues, which range from vague to screamingly obvious.
Spooky Secrets
The main plot of CARIMARA isn’t too complex. Certain parts of the solution are impossible to miss. However, it’s made better by the secrets that run throughout. For one thing, you can sleep, which changes the time of day, and there certain secrets that only unlock when the moon is in the right place. Hell, there’s an entirely different ending hidden away in CARIMARA, where we basically cause the end of the world. The achievement is called ‘Oops’, which sums the whole ending up nicely, really.
It’s difficult to really criticise something that’s such a small, complete package as CARIMARA. Though if I took a step back and looked at it overall, I’d say that CARIMARA‘s short length doesn’t give its gameplay time to breathe. The card system isn’t much different from a standard point’n’click interface. I’d have liked a way to combine cards to ask more searching questions, for instance. Like combining a character with garden tools, to learn a bit more about the garden before it all went to hell. As it is, the card system feels a little underused.
CARIMARA – Short & Spooky
The last thing to mention is that CARIMARA has a surprisingly heartfelt ending for such a short game. I think that’s because a lot of the legwork of the story is pieced together by us. We begin to figure out the circumstances that led to the ghost, and all of the characters we meet have an air of suspicion about them. Only for you to find the real ending and it hammers home how fragile life is, and concludes with a bittersweet punch to the gut.
Notably, CARIMARA ends with a note from the developer indicating that further episodes in the same style may be on the way. I think that’s a very good idea. CARIMARA certainly feels like a single piece of a larger game that needs a bit more time to breathe. Still, it almost perfectly sets out to achieve want it wanted to. A creepy short story, with lovely, creepy art and a story that unfolds at the same pace as the player. In the end, all that I wanted was a larger helping, which can only be a good sign.
