EMUUROM

At its best, Emuurom leads you to make new discoveries several times per minute. You are exploring a world, screen-by-screen, with nothing but a scanner you can point at the flora and fauna. Scan a cloud? It rains. The rain falls on a flower? It blooms. Scan a bird? It flies left to right. Scan a different bird? It shrieks. The shriek touches a flower? It splits into seeds. What do the seeds do? You'll discover that soon enough, with a little playful experimentation, and then discover another thing and another thing. Playing Emuurom is like being parachuted into the middle of Moominland without Tove Jansson's prose to guide you and so each new creature and interaction is yours to piece together.

That's Emuurom's surface layer, and it's a joy. It's where I live. Many people will try to convince you that this puzzle-platformer's greatness lies in the cleverness beneath that surface, however. Its developer has spent eight years constructing layer upon layer of secrets which reveal themselves only via perseverance and effort. Emuurom contains, for example, a unique language to translate. That's the kind of worldbuilding that makes a certain kind of person immediately excited, and it's a transparently impressive act of design. For me, a dummy, such depths are both admirable and off-putting, and so I am here to tell you that Emuurom is something much more than clever. It's fun.

Jumping on things and scanning them are the only modes of interaction here. Emuurom has no combat and your character, sent to this planet like a data upload, has no health bar and cannot die. Instead, the creatures that populate this planet either passively let you shove them around, move along fixed paths, or shove you back when prompted. One area has dolphin-like creatures that leap out of the water when you scan them, for example, so you scan them when they're beneath you and they shove you to a platform that's higher than you can jump.

I'm giving away that discovery for free because Emuurom is full of them, and you will intuit much of what you must do to progress without much conscious thought. The trick is to just keep scanning everything, old or new, and to trust that the game will reveal itself to you, at least until you reach its endgame. These reveals are delivered in part via written descriptions of the creatures and plants you encounter, each of which have names, behaviours, and occasionally short snippets of dialogue. They build up a picture of a world that is playfully alien and silly, when the pixels and puzzles might otherwise have been austere.