Creepy Tale: Some Other Place

I have a soft spot for small studios that iterate honestly, and Creepy Brothers have done exactly that across four entries now. Some Other Place is the clearest sign yet that they know who they are. The hand-drawn world Martin stumbles into, pulled through a hollow tree by a chattering little thief of a creature, has the quality of a storybook left out in the rain: warped, beautiful, a little wrong in all the right ways. The stop-frame animation style gives movement an uncanny weight, and composer Alexander Ahura's soundscape sits underneath everything like fog that never quite lifts. It is a short game - completion data clusters around four hours - but it fills that space with intention rather than padding. The core loop is classic point-and-click logic: walk left to right through distinct scenes, gather items, watch how creatures and environments respond, apply the right object to the right problem. What lifts Some Other Place above genre routine is puzzle variety. The standout is an enchanted time-manipulation ring that Martin acquires mid-game, which opens up some genuinely clever cause-and-effect chains. Elsewhere you will barter with trolls in a specific sequence, yell down wells, avoid a territorial monster gnawing at trees, and navigate a dwarven mining operation built inside a giant. The macabre weirdness of the scenario roster is one of the game's quiet pleasures - each new screen arrives with a creature or situation you simply did not predict. The series has had a complicated visual identity. The first entry leaned so heavily on artist John Kenn Mortensen's aesthetic that it caused real controversy. Some Other Place has finally cleared that shadow. The monster design feels owned rather than borrowed, and the environments - dark forests, cave systems, impossible interiors - carry a confident internal logic. The art now reads as Creepy Brothers' own voice rather than a tribute act. That matters for longevity, and you can feel the creative confidence in how the backgrounds are composed. There are honest rough edges to acknowledge. Some puzzles sever their connection to the story's emotional throughline - they are fun to solve in isolation but feel mechanically bolted on. The voice acting, performed with heavy Slavic accents, is serviceable but uneven; a handful of line readings break the spell briefly. A climactic arcade-style combat sequence near the end sits uncomfortably against the game's otherwise contemplative pacing, though it is skippable. And the linear structure means replayability is nearly zero once the puzzles are solved - you are buying a single, contained journey, not a sandbox. For newcomers, none of the prior games are required. The shared world surfaces as gentle nods and subtle callbacks that veterans will clock and first-timers can take at face value. For anyone already fond of the series, Some Other Place delivers on the promise that was always visible beneath the earlier entries' unevenness. If your tolerance for eerie atmosphere, modest runtime, and logic puzzles that occasionally require a moment of patient trial-and-error is healthy, this one earns its quiet, autumnal hours. Kai, Scout Team