Review of Greak: Memories of Azur – a beautiful sad tale

From time to time, a game appears that acts like a caress from the first moment and impresses a person so much that he falls in love with it immediately, like love at first sight. That’s exactly how I reacted to Greak, which disarmed me with a combination of wonderful cartoony stylization, heartfelt orchestral music, and a melancholic storyline. I remembered Ori, for example, but against this, the Greek has a noticeably more adult plot, which pushes the game more towards the area of ​​Valiant Hearts. Styling is reminiscent of Ni No Kuni.

• Platform: PS5 (peer review), XSX | S, PC, Switch
• Publication date: 17. 8. 2021
• Producer: Navegante Entertainment (Mexico)
• Genre: action platformer
• Czech location: Not
• Multiplayer: Not
• Data to download: 3 GB
• Game time: 10+ hours
• Availability: from 7 years
• Sales version: box and digital
• Price: 499 crowns (PS Store, Steam)

Brave brother and caring sister

The charming elven empire of Azur was attacked by a deadly army of Urlags, who also attracted dangerous epidemics, turning plants and animals into deadly monsters. As the people of the empire fight desperately against the tide of destruction, gather supplies and build escape ships, three siblings get lost in the battle-ravaged desert. You start out as the youngest Greek who can swing a sword when needed, but your main advantage is your small stature, allowing you to climb where no one can follow you. First of all, you must find your little sister named Adara. Luckily, it turns out that her magic training has paid off, and thanks to it, she can not only fight, but also open magical gates. Then all that remains is to find his older brother Rydel, a young but determined warrior in full armor.

The atmosphere is off the scale already in these introductory passages, which you will spend with abandoned children in the forest, looking for each other. Even when the Greek first enters the village, you can see how thin and impoverished the inhabitants of the war are – and yet they diligently share supplies and try to help each other survive until the ships are ready to flee. Although the entire game is visually stylized as a fairy tale, its plot is about a dark fantasy from a world where “Sauron won”. It was this combination of a serious plot with a beautiful fairy-tale stylization that struck me right in the heart. Especially since when you finally find your little sister, the siblings will be greeted and hugged thanks to well-written dialogue and beautiful animation. The play implicitly suggests that the war claimed the lives of the parents of this children’s trinity, among other things. My experience of the game has gone so far that I was impressed by a situation where the Greek ran out of supplies and Adara baked a cupcake for him from the collected berries.

The siblings are very welcome with great dialogue and beautiful animations.

But you will also get your money’s worth. The genre is a very traditional platform game with a good dose of action and light RPG elements, where, for example, you have to collect ingredients to make food around a campfire. Food complements your health, raw fruits or vegetables help, but more carefully cooked food is more effective. You also need to consider the limited size of your inventory, which forces you to decide how to combine and distribute inventory between your characters. Then, the interconnected game world is full of monster fighting and logic puzzles that get progressively more difficult as you gather a family and use the abilities of all three. The game is great on PS5 – movement and combat are fast and precise, also aided by modest but pleasant use of haptic feedback or the DualSense controller’s speakers.

One for all…

Surprisingly, this is a small indie game for a few hundred, and the whole world in which it takes place is surprisingly elaborate. Not only does it have its own story, reflected in locations, dialogues and objects, but also almost every character is named, thought out and, at best, will impress, like the three main characters. This is especially true of other children that you will meet in the last village, resisting the onslaught of enemies. But this also applies to polar bear fighting dogs that help you. I really enjoyed the game world and every moment in it, and I really wish we could see a sequel.

One of the main features of the game, namely controlling all three characters individually or at the same time (when you hold down the shutter button on the controller), is certainly fun, but also frustrating. While this works well when you’re jumping across platforms or fighting enemies, you’ll have trouble keeping multiple characters reasonably in sync in heavy boss fights. While they can fight on their own without your control, they won’t move, which is a big risk. Playing these walkthroughs requires a certain amount of patience and practice, but if, for example, your siblings’ AI were invulnerable, then it’s true that the feeling of mutual caring that the atmosphere of the game symbolizes in many ways would disappear. In the end, these more difficult and slightly dishonest playthroughs didn’t really spoil my excellent gaming experience, which I will remember for a long time.