NAIRI: Tower of Shirin

My first thought loading into Shirin was that I had no idea a Kickstarter-funded, two-person Dutch studio could produce something this visually composed. The art sits somewhere between Professor Layton, Studio Ghibli, and classic Disney, and the colour work is deliberate: lighting and palette choices actively guide your eye toward interactive objects without ever feeling like a cheat. For a point-and-click running on a budget of just over eight thousand euros, that level of craft is genuinely startling. The structure is classic adventure DNA. You pick up items, combine them, talk to a cast of anthropomorphic animals and humans who all share Shirin's layered districts, and chain those interactions into solutions. Rex, Nairi's ex-criminal companion-turned-scholar, gives the duo real texture. The puzzle variety is better than it first appears: early sequences involve escaping a bandit hideout using a dagger and some rope logic, mid-game has you running love-letter errands and finding a duck a fashionable hat, and the back half pushes into genuinely challenging territory inside the ancient Soluna Tower, with tile-path puzzles, symbol-cipher sequences, and coffin room logic that can stump experienced players. Some of those late-game puzzles veer toward obtuse, and a few players will reach for a guide. That is a fair criticism. What is less fair, given the budget, is expecting more mechanical invention than the genre traditionally provides. The soundtrack is the quiet star. Subdued and location-aware, it shifts register between the busy poor district and the eerie underground temple sections without ever calling attention to itself. There is no voice acting, and the typing-sound text substitute gets slightly grating over a long session, but the music more than compensates. Hidden coins scattered across nearly every scene can be traded for unlockable concept art, which is a small but satisfying layer for players who want to linger. The story earns its atmosphere for most of the run. The writing is quirky rather than polished, occasionally darker than the pastel exterior suggests, and it builds genuine curiosity about Nairi's place in the Noorian mythology. Then it stops. Hard. The cliffhanger ending is the game's most-discussed flaw across every review I found, and the criticism is warranted: you get maybe three-quarters of a satisfying arc before the credits roll. The good news is that a sequel, NAIRI: Rising Tide, released in late 2024, so you no longer have to sit with that abruptness. Playing the first chapter now means walking into a complete story across both games, which changes the calculus considerably. For a player who values handcrafted world-building and a peaceful pace over mechanical depth, this is the kind of small game that rewards a single quiet evening. Genre newcomers, families, and anyone whose last point-and-click was Monkey Island will find the difficulty curve hospitable. Veterans wanting the logic brutality of Grim Fandango should temper expectations. Roughly six to eight hours depending on puzzle speed, achievable at 100% completion in one sitting if you are determined.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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