Check out this gorgeous, sepia-toned apocalyptic adventure set in northern Finland

GamesAdventureCheck out this gorgeous, sepia-toned apocalyptic adventure set in northern FinlandWhen you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.

When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.

The humble point-and-click adventure game has gone through many iterations, with ups and downs year to year, but the genre has given up its relevance entirely. I know this because at least once a year I see one that’s just drop-dead interesting for some reason or other. Rauniot, out now from Finnish indie developer Act Normal Games, is drop-dead interesting because it’s drop-dead gorgeous.

With a world of rich, sepia-toned pre-rendered backgrounds, Rauniot promises point and click adventure puzzling in a pretty unexplored videogame setting: Northern Finland. With people unable to trust each other, small bands now scrabble for survival—that’s where protagonist Aino comes in, working to establish a group of survivors supporting each other. Interestingly, while the setting is bleak, not everything in the game has to be: achievement descriptions hint that there’s a way to survive without firing any bullets.

Despite being set in the post-apocalypse, Rauniot’s world is one that diverges from our own world in 1974 when “a massive natural disaster pushed the civilization over the edge.” The world that results is a retrofuture of a kind, where the computers are all CRT monitors and floppy disks while the cars are deliciously blocky, and some puzzles appear to involve tuning radio channels.

Developer Act Normal points at a variety of puzzles in Rauniot that don’t have to be tackled in a linear order or with a single solution, which should give variety to each person’s experience. A looping gif on the Steam store page shows the main character adroitly unlocking a padlock in one frame, then shooting it off with a pistol in an alternate one.

There’s something to be said here about the beauty of pre-rendered graphics. The technique is decades old and the results are proven and hard to argue with: Whether we’re talking about the backgrounds of theold Infinity Enginein Baldur’s Gate 1 & 2 or the charming streets of Ravachol inDisco Elysium.

Early user reviews of Rauniot are overall quite positive, with a majority saying that the Finnish voice acting adds to the atmosphere and the puzzles are engagingly difficult in a game that doesn’t hold your hand, but does have a nice fast travel to make adventure game fiddling more bearable. Negative reviews seem to dock the story as having a bit of a vague ending.

You can find Rauniot onGOG,Green Man Gaming, andSteamfor $18.

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