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Morrok is an escape-room style point and click puzzle game. Its gameplay consists of walking around a series of locked dungeons, searching for keys, levers, gears and other knick-knacks, and using them on things in the environment to progress. Unfortunately, it’s also a prime example of the genre’s shortcomings, with easy, tedious puzzles that do more to test your patience than cleverness. The game is also incredibly short for its price, and can be completed in roughly an hour.
But before I complain, let’s start with positives. I think the game looks really pretty, with a solid atmosphere and setting. Clearly, most effort went into modelling and designing the environments, but the sound design and animation are also quite competent. Every time you use an item on something, an animation will show the interaction, which is quite fun to look at. Unfortunately, that’s about it.
The main issue with Morrok is that it adheres to what I call the “lock and key” style of puzzle design. It goes something like this: you find a key which opens a box, in which you find a crowbar that lets you pry open a drawer, in which you find a lever which opens a secret compartment, where you find a 4 digit code that lets you open a safe, and so on and so forth. Every object is, essentially, a “key” which opens the next “lock” - you find things to clear obstacles to find things. This kind of puzzle requires very little actual thinking on the part of the player, because which keys go into which locks is fairly obvious, and once you find the first key, the rest is basically a linear process. You never have to consider the order in which you perform actions, solve riddles or come up with creative ways to use items.
The only real challenge, then, is finding the objects themselves, which can be quite annoying. With how decorated each interior is, which objects are interactable and which aren’t can feel very arbitrary, and you might get stuck for a while because you assumed a key item was part of the decor. It’s not exactly pixel-hunting, as the objects are usually quite visible, but they sorta camouflage themselves. What makes this significantly worse is the game’s movement system, which consists of switching between a number of pre-defined, standable spots. Some items can only be interacted with when you stand in the correct place. This is most egregious in Chapter IV, where a chain is clearly visible from two different places, but is only interactable from another, third spot.
To top it off, the game’s writing can be best described as “obligatory”. It adds very little to the experience, and feels like it does the bare minimum to justify the puzzle gameplay. The protagonist you control is the most witless, laconic man imaginable. While other adventure games usually use non-interactable objects as an opportunity to have the character say something funny or interesting, in Morrok, you’ll just get plain, boring descriptions of whatever you’re looking at.
This isn’t helped by the frequent grammar errors in the localisation:
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3108730211
This game is supposed to be the first chapter of a series, but nothing set up here really makes me excited to see where the story or gameplay goes next. For a price of 12 euro, it’s far too short and simplistic to be worth it. If you really want to try it, get it on sale.
