Games

RiME - the sad story of a little prince

Creating a computer game is a long and laborious process that requires significant resources and dedication of developers. In addition, it is often thorny, as can be seen in the example RiME- an indie project from a little-known Spanish studio Tequila Works . It took the creators of the game five years to make the story of the adventures of the boy in the red cloak available to the audience. Already in the early stages, the studio experienced serious problems with funding.

Developers initially supported Microsoft and Sony, but soon both publishers stopped their support, apparently believing that the project had no chance. And it is not known how this whole story would have ended if the idea Tequila Works didn't look attractive gray box.

Story line

Why is RiME so remarkable and unusual that it has already been dubbed another handmade masterpiece? Unusually bright and colorful graphics, wonderful musical accompaniment and a heart touching story about love, loss and death. And also the lack of language voice acting and navigation, which, however, is not new. The game begins with the fact that the main character, a boy of 10-12 years old, finds himself on the seashore of a small picturesque island. The sun shines brightly, seagulls soar in the sky, with a soft roar the waves of the warm ocean break on the sandy shore.

The boy does not know who he is, how he got to this mysterious island, it is only known that in order to avoid this he needs to climb to the top of the white tower, a huge column rising in the center of the island. Along the way, he will have to collect fragments of memories and solve puzzles, the only way to restore a picture of the past in his memory and understand the meaning of his stay in this beautiful and mysterious archipelago. And so, the little hero sets off on his journey. As you progress, it turns out that the boy can run, jump, dive and swim, climb rocks, carry various objects and ... scream. Yes, it is in this unusual way that RiME manages objects and transforms the surrounding reality.

For example, to break a huge jug blocking the path, you need to shout at it well. Under the influence of sound waves of the voice, statues-totems “come to life”, which, in turn, open doors, start elevators and other useful mechanisms, torches are lit with their voices, annoying representatives of the local fauna are scared away with their voices. The solution to other puzzles is based on the play of light and shadow, and RiME has the majority of such puzzles. However, the puzzles are far from the most important thing in the game, they are too simple, the main focus is on the fabulously colorful world and on the protagonist himself.

The mysterious island that he has to explore is not so uninhabited anymore. At the beginning of the passage, the boy meets a fox (a clear allusion to Antoine de Saint-Exupery's The Little Prince), who becomes his partner and guide in this beautiful, but strange world, where magic and the miraculous coexist with high-tech devices. Most of the creatures inhabiting the world of RiME are harmless, but you should not relax, some of them can still pose a threat to the little hero. Take at least a skull-headed bird and either people or ghosts in dark robes. The boy does not have to fight them, all he can do is run away.

The RiME game world consists of four locations - you can get to the next one only by going through the previous one and finding the main artifact - the key. Leaving the azure coast and the hills of the island, the hero finds himself in an abandoned city, and then in a gloomy rainy labyrinth. All locations are completely different from each other, but all are picturesque and have wonderful musical accompaniment, sad and bewitching at the same time. And in RiME you will not hear a word, there are no dialogues in the game, it is perceived intuitively, the meaning of what is happening is revealed only in the final and then not completely, leaving everyone a certain amount of fantasy in the interpretation of the ending.

The final

If the creators of RiME can guarantee anything, these are indescribable emotions at the end, but in order to feel the full charm of the game, you need to take a holistic approach to it, not limited to evaluating the gameplay, graphics or psychologism, although it is the latter that plays a big role in it. If we consider RiME one-sidedly, it will turn out to be quite a secondary, but for someone, perhaps, a mediocre product. And this is understandable, because there is nothing innovative in the game, something that jaded consumers of the gaming industry usually expect. The beauty of RiME is in its simplicity and depth at the same time, and also in the emotional richness and the viewer's turning from the world of everyday life to the eternal theme of love and death.