Thy Creature Preview

As soon as you boot up Thy Creature, the game presents a cutscene that is supposed to give some sort of backstory as to what is happening. There's no dialogue in it, only pictures passing in chronological order, and although it is visually beautiful, it is very confusing. Just to make sure I understood, I watched it twice — Creature (the main character) wakes up from a grave and stumbles through a forest, where he sees his reflection and notices he is kind of an abomination, as his face is patched with different skins and his eyes aren’t matching. Because of this, when he arrives at the town, he gets attacked and quickly retreats. After this, is when he is shown travelling for a very long time until he reaches a castle. As he arrives, he gets some sort of flashback in which an unknown face similar to his appears.

Once he is inside, the context becomes a bit better as there is now dialogue, not only from Creature verbalising his thoughts, but also from characters speaking to each other; however, the context continued to be vague and I understood very little of what was really happening with all the mystery. This is especially amplified as Creature himself refuses to tell other characters what he is looking for in the castle. Aside from that, at times it was a bit difficult for me to know if I had understood for sure what the characters were saying, as I believe the creator is Korean and the dialogue felt like broken English. 

Creature mentions that he feels he must come to this castle because there is something there for him, and soon after that you experience your first battle. The game offers a battling system I had never encountered before: You enter a chess-like map, with an enemy at the top and you at the bottom. Soon the enemy begins throwing projectiles around like in bullet-hell games, and you must dodge them whilst collecting some rock fragments around the map; sometimes the enemy will close the gap and make it harder to dodge, causing the player to take a longer path to collect the rock. Every one piece you collect is a hit, and the fight ends when you collect enough or you get hit too many times. I didn't die in the game and I quite enjoyed the battles, despite the fact that I couldn't change the controls from the arrow keys. After every battle won, there is a small sequence of vague, contextless memories that Creature seems to recall, but this only worked to further confuse me, as it felt they were not spread apart enough for me to understand the context of them. 

Thy Creature is reminiscent of titles like Fran Bow, which I played a few years back. As you walk around from scene to scene and explore different areas, interacting with things allows you to see how the character feels and understand the story better. Unfortunately, I felt it was a bit awkward to manoeuvre around to find the interaction points, and being unable to change the controls emphasised that awkwardness. Aside from that, I was slightly bothered that Creature seemed to have a haphazard understanding of things — he was socially inept and often surprised by people's reactions, asked what things like elixirs were, and yet somehow knew that one of the things smelled like turnips. It is a small gripe, but to anyone that dislikes having their immersion broken, perhaps it's a good thing to mention. 

The game also includes puzzles that work by grabbing plushies from the floor and putting them onto a chair. Each chair opens a new path to explore, which will sometimes give you access to new plushies to find and place on the chairs, or just new areas in general. I appreciated the puzzles as they were fun enough, and although they didn't take too much thinking, they might get harder as the game goes on. These puzzles are also introduced into the battling system, as during one of the fights, a plushie and a few chairs were available to use so that I could traverse the map into closed areas and get the rock needed to kill the enemy. During the fight, I only got to use the plushie on one chair, as the rest of the necessary rocks appeared around the open area. 

Lastly, the game provides some collectibles to gather as you walk around. They seem to be random items — such as a chessboard — but it is quite entertaining to watch the collection grow; every item you collect, as well as every NPC you meet, will unlock a profile on the menu that you can read and learn more on Creature's perspective of them. This gives further reason to find the interactable points, as some of them are the collectible items. 

The atmosphere that the graphics offer, the camera's hidden angle, and the music provide a dark and strange feel that is fitting to the theme of the game overall. It gives a feeling of unease, especially as you walk past the twitching, broken plushies on the ground.

All in all, Thy Creature does a good job at keeping up the unsettling atmosphere through not only the bizarre interactions with the characters, but also the dark music and graphics, and odd camera angles. Unfortunately, the awkward way they speak makes it feel like there is a language barrier causing important context to be missed, and the lack of customisation for the controls might dissuade some from trying it. Still, for those who do not mind those controls, are intrigued by the lack of context, and don't particularly feel the dialogue is confusing, this might be a good game to keep an eye out for.  

Thy Creature is available now to play through Steam’s Early Access and is expected to come out within the year, so everyone interested be sure to wishlist!