Their wordless voice carries some kind of power to activate the statues, sending a green spirit flittering back toward the five original statues. Wander off to find out what they are, and you’re soon climbing Uncharted-style until you reach the lights, which are actually produced by more statutes, colored in jade.Įach green statue is clearly important, but what to do with them? A quick expeRimental round of button presses and you discover that one makes the child shout. What needs to be done isn’t immediately clear, but look around and pillars of green light reaching into the sky will attract your attention. The first one, for instance, brings the child into a large open space with four strange statues surrounding a fifth larger one. To Rime’s credit, the game simply throws puzzle after puzzle at you - There’s no explanation given, and none necessary. That part of the game - the actual puzzle-solving - is competent and enjoyable, but ultimately pretty lightweight. A friendly, strangely magical fox appears to lead them to the tower, and with no prompting or dialogue at all, it’s off to solve puzzles to find the way forward. Not far from where they awaken is a gleaming white tower surrounded by ruins and statues. The surface-level premise of Rime finds a shipwrecked child stranded on a Mediterranean-esque island, trying to figure out what to do about the situation. The emotional themes of the game’s five main areas aren’t clear until you complete the game and see the whole picture.īut Rime’s dedication to those themes, and its careful deployment of beautiful imagery and swelling music, is just enough to make a fun, mostly pleasant puzzle title stand out from the crowd. What it’s trying to deliver, though, is a specific set of feelings mostly captured in art direction and music.Įxplaining the exact feelings and emotions Rime hopes to instill in you would take away from its journey across a gorgeous island, over a sun-bleached desert, and through a shadowy, rain-drenched necropolis. On the surface, Rime is an action-adventure puzzle game, with climbing and running and pushing boxes into their correct positions to open doors. Tequila Works’ Rime draws much of its inspiration from that well. Where AAA games have focused on recapturing the nostalgia of games from 30 years ago, or trying to squeeze the most jump scares into 20 minutes, games like What Remains of Edith Finch, Abzu, Journeyand Insidehave used the language of video games - running, jumping, sliding, fighting - to deliver very particular feelings. Some of the most interesting indie games of the last few years have focused on channeling the emotional power of interactive storytelling.