If – heaven forbid – someone was to kidnap someone close to us, we’d like it to be the antagonists of Shapik: The Quest. The lazy buggers barely get a few doors down from Shapik, the main character of this quest, before settling down for a sleep. We’d like to think that even we could get our loved ones back if that was the case.
The kidnappers only get a few doors because Shapik: The Quest is the merest sliver of a graphic adventure – a point-and-click that’s over after a few points and clicks. There are ten screens in total to explore before the credits roll. That’s less than an hour’s worth of play for £4.19, and you might assume that it’s not worth a recommendation as a result.
But while Shapik: The Quest may be shorter than a power-nap, it’s as satisfying and certainly more entertaining. Basically, we’re on Team Brevity for Shapik: The Quest. While it might not take long to complete, it manages to make those few minutes count, creating an imaginative point-and-click adventure that never has a dull moment.
Shapik: The Quest begins with Shapik’s friend/sibling/lover being caught in a net and hauled away. We’re unsure of who they are simply because Shapik eschews the written word completely. Everyone talks in icons, soundtracked by toots and trumpets, which makes it hard to know exactly who you are saving. But the rest is pretty clear: a loved one has been nabbed, and it’s your mission to get them back. And that means trudging through the world to find them.
Similar to a lot of Cotton Game’s graphic adventures like Mr Pumpkin, or the Journey Down series, the world of Shapik: The Quest is surreal and otherworldly. A tentacle longs for their pet slug; a furnace that is in the shape of an angler fish is powered by binary. As you’d hope with a graphic adventure that dabbles in the abstract, there’s still a thread of logic tying it all together. The pet slug can be found behind a frog, once you’ve fed the frog some flies. The binary-powered furnace can be bypassed once you’ve memorised some of its output. While it might seem like something Lewis Carroll doodled on a napkin, it has its own internal logic.
We’re fans of how Shapik: The Quest looks, too. Every scene is hand-drawn, and there’s a Machinarium-like beauty to it all. While the world is occasionally grotesque, that grotesqueness is rendered beautifully, and the hand-drawn backgrounds also mean that the scenes are clear. It’s never a problem to find an interactive element in the scene. There’s no ‘show every interactive element’ button, which most modern point-and-clicks opt to include, simply because it doesn’t need one. There’s only ten screens, and everything is evident within them.
The rest of the controls are spot-on, though. This is a graphic adventure that was made for console, as you have two options throughout: move, and interact with the thing that you’ve moved next to. A helpful indicator pops up when you’re near something that can be poked, so you will rarely miss anything. And while you gain a bee-friend who can prod things far away from you, the game will gesture to tell you when something can be used in this way. Shapik: The Quest has no interest in you getting lost with what to do next.
While Shapik: The Quest may be short, it has a knack for rewarding you with secrets. If an idea pops into your head about something you might be able to do – or a different order of things – then it will probably let you do it, handing you an achievement for your troubles. So, while it’s short, it’s reasonably dense, and there are hidden objects to find, plus a handy chapter-skip function that means returning for them is rarely annoying.
That’s not to say that the thirty-minutes-to-an-hour of Shapik: The Quest are foible-free. If we were a AAA publisher with some money on a table, Dragon’s Den-style, we would make a few requests. First of all, Shapik: The Quest could have afforded to be more wilfully absurd than it is. You get the sense that the devs are holding back, that they’re worried about losing the player. But we were eager for the world to react in a multitude of bizarre ways, like we were tinkering with machines in Wonka’s Factory, but we never quite got that feeling.
The same goes for the puzzles. Very occasionally, Shapik: The Quest will pause the action for minigames like some Pipe Mania shenanigans, where you are turning pipes to create a flow from one end of a grid to another. Or you have to memorise a code. Which, if we’re being honest, are things we have done countless times before. In something more grounded, these puzzles might have made sense, but in this bizarre Wonderland, it feels like they are a little on the safe side.
And then there’s the very, very short length. Does it matter? We’d say not, personally, but we certainly could have played more of Shapik: The Quest. When you finish a game with the feeling that you could have easily enjoyed a game that was five or six-times the length, that’s quite the statement. Normally, we’d shave off or add 10% or 20% to a game’s length: here, we would happily take and pay for another 500%.
But enter the world of Shapik: The Quest, fully armed with the information that it’s extremely, stupendously short (but still worth the money), and you’re less likely to be blindsided. You can enjoy it for what it is: a hand-crafted little point-and-click adventure that gives a momentary view into a world that you will want to spend more time in.
So, there you go, Rapid Snail, developers of Shapik: The Quest. You have at least one punter interested in a full-length game in your world. You hooked us. Now, if you could sell enough copies so that it’s more than a pipe dream…
You can buy Shapik: The Quest from the Xbox Store
