Bokida — Heartfelt Reunion Review
The perfect cure for a bad day
Video games have long been known as a great way to let off some steam or escape from the pressures and troubles of one’s daily life; Rice Cooker Republic’s stunning exploration and puzzle title, Bokida — Heartfelt Reunion, is the perfect cure for a bad day. It lightens spirits and relaxes the mind through stunning visuals and softly played music, allowing for complete immersion and freedom while exploring the game’s open world or solving its puzzles.
Rice Cooker Republic has developed a stunning open-world game that shows how minimalistic presentation can create something incredibly beautiful. The game relies on puzzles and experimentation while exploring the vast landscape, where puzzle-solving opens up access to new abilities and new levels. Players are given four abilities to aid in their exploration: to build, cut, push or clean.
The game begins showered in black and grey, almost resembling a forest setting, before gradually revealing greater beauty through minimalistic effects and colour changes. Its story is left quite ambiguous, as well, with a narrator simply explaining that “the two” need to come back together and create balance in the world again; this combines with the game’s stunning visuals to create an intense, intriguing prologue that sees players exploring the entire setting through the body of an unnamed character until they find a door and learn about their ability to build.
The story is far from being the game’s main focus, and things eventually open up to showcase a stunning and explorable black and white landscape. Noticing something that seems a bit out of place in one of the game’s many areas can often introduce a new puzzle that needs to be solved, such as a gap in a pillar, or a doorway that can be opened to a new area. Navigating the setting allows players to build turquoise-coloured blocks to either fill in gaps or stack, slash and push obstacles, and even clean the debris out of the way, which is a great way to start over when you’re unhappy with a particular build. Players can also jump from tall pillars and glide through the landscape, allowing them to feel free and behold this game’s absolute beauty.
Bokida maintains its incredible immersion by serenading players with calm, romantic music. The subtle sounds encourage players to explore their surroundings, and pull them further into the monochromatic world, making hours seem like minutes. The ability to explore the setting in any way you want, with full control of where to go and how, gives the player freedom to explore at their own pace; this freedom is what makes the game a positive way to escape and relax the mind. There is also no pressure to complete the puzzles, so that focus is entirely on the player’s ability to approach the puzzles and solve them whenever they can, and taking time to focus and experiment with the puzzles can lead to fantastic results without the feeling of pressure.
Although Bokida — Heartfelt Reunion’s story remains quite ambiguous and is certainly not the highlight of the game, this does not at all detract from its beauty. Bokida is something that anyone can take a liking to; even if you’re not a fan of puzzles, its explorative gameplay combines with stunning visuals and sounds to convey a calm and relaxed setting to escape to. Overall, Rice Cooker Republic has developed a gem that has ignited into a colourful and beautiful game.
Our Verdict:
Bokida — Heartfelt Reunion’s minimalistic approach is works to its advantage in creating a well-thought out puzzle game that gives the player complete freedom to explore and escape into a stunning world.
We reviewed Bokida — Heartfelt Reunion using a review code supplied by the publisher. The game is available now on Steam for Windows.
