Koira

I went into Koira expecting something gentle and came out of it a little undone. Studio Tolima's debut is a two-character story told entirely without text or spoken dialogue - you play a forest spirit, you rescue a glowing-nosed puppy from a hunter's snare, and from that first moment the game trusts its visuals and its score to carry everything. That trust is almost completely earned. The moment-to-moment play sits comfortably in the same lineage as Journey and ABZU: light environmental puzzles, careful pacing, mood over mechanics. Concretely, you are moving through shaded groves, snowy hills, and dark caves, activating ancient shrine monuments by collecting nearby musical notes and singing them back, digging out buried paths with the puppy's help, throwing sticks to knock apples from trees to feed your companion, building snowmen, and playing fetch. The hide-and-seek you play early on with the pup is also the stealth tutorial the game never announces - later, when hunters and their tracking dogs close in, that same mechanic becomes survival. It is a quiet piece of craft design that I genuinely appreciated. The composer Reginald Nowe built a reactive score that shifts registers in real time: soft woodwinds and metallic percussion when you and the puppy are goofing around; heavier, darker tones the moment danger enters the frame. Sitting still just to let a passage finish is something several reviewers mentioned, and I understand the impulse entirely. The honest criticism is that the mechanical variety is thin. You are cycling through a small set of interactions - shrine puzzle, stealth sequence, companion mini-game, repeat - and over a four-to-five hour runtime that repetition does accumulate. The stealth sections in particular have been flagged widely: the hunters and their dogs are sensitive enough that a misjudged hiding spot sends you back to restart the sequence, which chips at the immersion the game works so hard to build. The autosave gives no indication of when it has triggered, so if you step away mid-section you may have to replay more than you expected. None of these are dealbreakers, but they are worth knowing going in. The game also has no collectibles or branching paths, so replay value is essentially zero. What carries all of this is the handcraft. The art was built in Godot and is fully hand-drawn, using a restrained palette - whites, blacks, grays, and carefully placed reds that carry narrative weight when they appear. The puppy's animations alone communicate a full emotional arc: cowering when scared, bouncing when happy, pausing to look back at you when uncertain. That is characterisation without a single word, and it lands. Koira won Belgian Game of the Year 2025 along with awards for Best Audio and Best Narrative, which feels right. This is a game that knows its scale, accepts its limitations, and delivers precisely what it promises. If you came here for mechanical depth, branching systems, or a run-time over six hours, Koira is not your game. But if you have ever loved a short animated film more than a blockbuster, if the words Journey or Gris or Neva mean something to you, if you are willing to let a small hand-drawn forest work on you for an evening - this is the one. Slow opening, sure. The payoff is worth it. Kai, Scout Team

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