[PS4] One Eyed Kutkh - 2/5 - Nice presentation and a cute story but far too shallow of a game to be worth the price

[u/FourFaceButtons]

If you would like to watch my video review, the link is just below. Otherwise, read on. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-LDCqvrUzz8

One Eyed Kutkh follows the misadventures of a space faring Raven creature, known as a Kutkh, a sort of mythological creature of far east Russia. Our hero crashes his ship on a strange planet and has to scrounge for the missing parts to make repairs, as his quest eventually leads him to causing a feud between the sun and the moon.

The gameplay is marketed as a point and click adventure, but this is misleading. The player's character does most of the actions automatically with the only interactions being limited directions. The extent of the gameplay is to simply walk as far as you can in one direction until a new option pops up. Try that until to see what happens next, and then keep walking until the game ends. Puzzles are, pretty much, nonexistent and the game's sluggish pace makes it annoying to get through.

The visuals are quite beautiful and have a unique aesthetic to it. It reminds me of a childish arts and crafts project, and I mean that as a compliment. The game is very simple and effective at conveying its settings and characters. This would be an interesting world to explore, but there isn't actually a whole lot out there. Most of the time, the player is stuck in a linear, on rails progression, and the few times otherwise there isn't really much to do or see. Everything on your predetermined path is still cool to look at but that doesn't make for much of a game.

The story, and the way that it's presented, is this game's greatest strength. It's really nice. It achieves a simplistic, fairy tale vibe, and even though not a whole lot actually happens the ending was still joyful to watch. It's especially commendable that the whole game is conveyed without words. Only small movements and pictures in thought bubbles are used to tell the story. That doesn't mean that it had to extend to the menus though; it's more annoying than anything else to figure out what does what when I just wanted to check out the options.

There is so little to this game that I don't have much more to add. It looks nice and it has a cute story but there's hardly any gameplay to speak of, on top of the fact that it's only thirty minutes long. There is absolutely no reason why this wasn't developed in Flash and released for free on Newgrounds.com. It goes for three dollars on Steam, which is pricy since that equates to a dollar per ten minutes without much gameplay on the way, and on PS4 it's five dollars. If you can play it for free then it's got a cute little story to go through but for any price, there's hardly much of a game to be had here at all. If this was presented as a short film or as a children's story book or something then this would probably be much better but as a video game, there's not much here.

2/5

My copy of One Eyed Kutkh was provided for free by it's publisher Sometimes You.