Munin

I have a soft spot for small studio puzzle games that bet everything on a single, well-turned mechanic, and Munin is exactly that kind of bet. Portuguese developer Gojira built the whole experience around one idea: the level is a grid of tiles, and you rotate any tile you are not standing on in 90-degree increments, watching walls become floors, ceilings open into passages, boulders roll under the new gravity, and lava redirect itself accordingly. That is the entire toolkit. Whether it sustains nine worlds and roughly 77 levels is the real question. For the most part, it does. Each of the nine worlds introduces its own physical wrinkle to the rotation system. One world adds swimmable water that flows into your rotated spaces; another drops laser beams that kill on contact and restart the level completely; a third links tiles so that spinning one causes a second to shift in tandem. The goal in every level is to collect feathers scattered across the grid, and the game teaches each new mechanic wordlessly in the first few stages of each world before the levels expand from 3x1 grids to 3x3 arrangements that require serious spatial planning. Nordic rune halves must be aligned to unlock hidden feathers, stones obey gravity and can be steered into new positions, and the layering of all these systems into a single screen-sized puzzle becomes genuinely satisfying when it clicks. The watercolor-style backgrounds do real work here too. Stone giants stride past in the background, Hel watches from the shadows, and the animated scenery gives each world a distinct, slightly uncanny atmosphere. The per-world soundtrack is laid-back and a little haunting, which I mean as a compliment. It keeps the temperature low when a puzzle is refusing to cooperate. But there are real frustrations worth naming before you commit. The difficulty curve is jagged in a way that feels unintentional rather than designed. Consecutive levels can swing from solved-in-ninety-seconds to genuinely opaque, with no hint system of any kind to bridge the gap. A death resets all collected feathers and all tile rotations in that level, which stings most in the larger late-game grids where you may have spent several minutes arranging things. The character controls are the other sore point. Munin's jump is floaty and imprecise, her hitbox is slightly smaller than her sprite implies so some deaths feel unearned, and catching a platform corner can stall a jump entirely. None of this is catastrophic, but in a game where restarts are the punishment, imprecise controls add artificial difficulty on top of the intended kind. The narrative, introduced through text screens in a Norse-poetry style inspired by the Poetic Edda, is atmospheric in small doses but never develops into anything that carries emotional weight. If you arrive hoping the myth will be meaningfully explored, it mostly functions as aesthetic wallpaper. Where I land: Munin is the kind of small game that knows exactly what it is and spends its runtime doing that one thing with care. The rotation mechanic is genuinely squeezed for everything it can yield, and the moments where physics, linked tiles, and environmental hazards all interact inside a single puzzle are the kind of quiet triumphs that only this format can produce. The rough edges, floaty jumping and erratic difficulty spikes included, are real, but they sit inside a package that is intentional, handcrafted, and priced accordingly for the tier it lives in. Spatial reasoning fans who prefer contemplative problem-solving over narrative will find more here than the Metacritic score of 68 suggests. Players allergic to checkpoint-less restarts or who need a hint system to stay patient should probably look elsewhere first.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

Be the first to comment on Munin.