Haimrik

I spend a lot of time hunting for the small, weird game that nobody quite knows how to categorize, and Haimrik is exactly that. Colombian studio Below the Game built something genuinely strange here: a 2D action-puzzle adventure where the text of a storybook is literally the world you walk through. Sentences become platforms. Nouns become tools. You stand over the word "sword" and a sword materializes in your hand. You find "torch," and it replaces the sword you were already holding. The whole game is built around that single, quietly brilliant idea. The word-based puzzle structure works in two interlocking layers. In the outer world you wander a sepia-toned medieval village, chat with eccentric NPCs, and advance a political revolt against King Udolf and his elite generals, the Word Warriors. Then the magic book pulls you inside, and the real game begins. Puzzle screens are self-contained arenas spread across three floors of living narrative text. You read ahead, figure out which nouns, like crossbow, barrel, tar, or torch, will solve the problem in front of you, and you run back and forth activating them in the right order. Some items combine; a barrel plus tar plus torch, for instance, can become a makeshift projectile that will also kill you if you stand too close. The one-item-at-a-time inventory rule means every screen demands a bit of forward planning, and the game mostly respects your intelligence enough not to over-explain. Boss encounters, including a dragon chase and a wizard fight, ramp up to real-time reaction tests where enemy attacks flash red against the page and you scramble to find your green-highlighted counter before the screen turns into a bloodbath. And it will turn into a bloodbath, frequently, because death in Haimrik is lavish and cartoonishly gory: pools of vivid red ink bleeding across an otherwise monochrome world. The art direction makes that contrast feel intentional rather than gratuitous. The craft on display in the visuals is the part that earns genuine admiration. The hand-drawn, storybook aesthetic keeps everything feeling handmade in a way that most indie games only approximate. Even the cutscenes keep you in control, running Haimrik left to right as illustrated vignettes scroll behind him. The soundtrack uses period-adjacent instruments to maintain atmosphere, though it lacks variety and a few reviewers noted it wears out its welcome by the later chapters. There is no voice acting, but the written dialogue carries a consistent dry wit, and supporting characters like Masamba, a lioness companion who genuinely tries to eat you while also saving your life, land well enough to stick with you after the credits. The criticisms are real and worth knowing going in. The game runs roughly four to five hours, and there is no replay hook whatsoever: one save file, no mission select, no branching, no collectables to hunt. Once the book closes, it stays closed. Some of the puzzle vocabulary repeats itself too often in the later chapters, and the direct combat sections, where you simply mash an attack button against guards, feel like a different and lesser game intruding on the more interesting one. A handful of boss sequences cross from challenging into chaotic, the pacing of some sequences is more frantic than satisfying, and a significant portion of critics felt the central concept deserved at least another few hours of development time to fully breathe. The Metacritic score of 58 reflects that ambivalence, though Steam's smaller but enthusiastic user base skews far more warmly. For the right player, those flaws are easy to absorb. If you are drawn to games that take one unusual mechanical idea and commit to it completely, if you have a tolerance for Looney Tunes-level violence delivered with genuine wit, and if four focused hours of something genuinely new sounds more appealing than twenty hours of something familiar, Haimrik earns its place. It is the kind of debut that makes you want to track what the studio does next.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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