Morkredd

To survive in Morkredd’s deadly darkness, you need light, and its only source is a huge glowing ball that you have to roll in front of you as you navigate environments full of obstacles. The game’s puzzles are simple yet clever, the journey is engaging, but the whole thing is very short (ca. two hours) and sometimes it is annoyingly easy to die.

Mørkredd’s mechanics of staying in the light while shadows abound are engaging and fun, especially with a partner, but a focus on manual dexterity and lack of story and characters won’t appeal to adventure game purists.

Not the first game to focus so literally on the contrast between light and dark, Morkredd isn’t brimming with aesthetic originality, but its puzzles make up for in plentiful amount. It’s the surprisingly deceptive nature of its puzzle-solving — and the many hidden dangers its rendition of darkness brings — where Morkredd‘s best moments are to be found. Puzzles that somewhat rely on a preconceived assumption of movement so as to trip you over, yet more importantly are designed in such a way to encourage you to think carefully about your next move. Slow and steady is the general order of play here. Its world may seem too insistent on its own implied sense of shock and surprise, not least when it tries to be climactic for climactic’s sake. But despite the lack of any real meaningful exposition with its narrative or its world-building, the true revelation lies with how Morkredd makes each step forward into the dark an anxious yet entertaining one to consider.