As a parent of young kids, I’m always on the lookout for games that we can enjoy together. This year has already offered several hits in my household, such as Bonnie Bear Saves Frogtime and Moomintroll: Winter’s Warmth. Tukoni: Forest Keepers seemed likely to join their ranks. It’s based on the picture books of Ukrainian artist and author Oksana Bula, who also served as the game’s art director. Unsurprisingly, Tukoni’s hand-drawn art is its standout feature.
Playing as a forest spirit, you help forest creatures prepare for winter. There is no dialogue; characters’ speech is represented by infographics that provide clues as to their needs and desires. Gameplay largely consists of the sort of inventory puzzles featured in classic point-and-click adventure games with a few minigames thrown in for variety. The gameplay loop, at least for us, consisted of “talking” to everyone in an area and picking up all items, then taking another pass of the area and attempting to use those items with various characters and environmental features. When we got stuck, which we did on several occasions, we took a look in the handy notebook that keeps track of important information. If that didn’t reveal a path forward, we attempted to combine items together or used items with people and objects we didn’t initially try. If we were still stuck, we’d case the place again, seeing whether we missed anything, and try increasingly unlikely combinations of items and characters/objects until something new happened.
There is a hint system, but only for the minigames, such as making tea or packing our backpack. Unfortunately, it didn’t help us when we needed it, because we didn’t need tea-making to be explained. Rather, we didn’t know what sort of tea we should make. After joining the developers’ Discord server to ask them for help, it turned out that tea-making wasn’t even the thing we needed to be doing, despite the infographics suggesting otherwise.
Are inventory puzzles fun? There are beloved point-and-click adventure games: The Secret of Monkey Island (1990), Grim Fandango (1998), and more recently, Norco (2022). But are these games beloved for their gameplay or in spite of it? When I think back fondly of my time with Monkey Island 2 (1991), I’m remembering its humour and its music (in addition to its catchy tunes, it’s the first use of the legendary iMUSE system for interactive music). My experiences wandering around not knowing what to do were not fun, and unfortunately that described most of my hours in Monkey Island 2. Norco gripped me with the quality of its writing and its social commentary. The inventory puzzles and minigames were a welcome interlude between dialogue-heavy sections, but they were, thankfully, not the star of the show.
Unlike classic point-and-clicks, you can play Tukoni with a controller, which is what the developers recommend. My 7-year-old was able to navigate the space with ease. Problems arose for us when we attempted to use the items we had collected. We opened our inventory and selected an item, then we selected an object in the environment. Nothing happened. I brought up the menu to see if it contained information about how to play. It did not, aside from what controller buttons performed which actions. We wandered around some more and pressed some more buttons at random. I was starting to get worried that I would have to confess to my editor that I couldn’t figure out how to complete the prologue of this children’s game. I looked up a playthrough of the demo on YouTube, but the demo was not of the prologue.
Then I decided to try keyboard input instead. The change in control scheme eventually got my brain working in the way the game expected it to. I began drawing on my knowledge of classic point-and-clicks. I remembered that mice are good for clicking and dragging. I clicked on an item in my inventory and realized that I could drag it to the place I wanted the character to use it. Success! Yes, you can click and drag items with a controller by pressing a button and using the left stick to choose a place to apply it, but it’s unintuitive and clunky. Inventory management is easier with a mouse, but exploring the environment is less intuitive, especially for young people who haven’t played a point-and-click game and might struggle to perform a double click because they haven’t spent thousands of hours in front of a computer. In short, I don’t think either control scheme is ideal. I wished I could have switched between the two—controller for moving the character and a mouse for inventory management—but you need to exit the game to change the control scheme. I wonder whether a touch screen might be ideal for this game, especially for kids.
But is this game for kids? The developers describe it as a “family-friendly adventure that parents and children can enjoy together.” My kids did find the picture-book-like illustrations of animal characters appealing. The minimal reading makes it possible for even pre-literate children to play on their own, at least in theory. Though we almost didn’t make it through the prologue! The only reason we did was that I was able to draw on my experience with other point-and-click adventure games. And even then I wouldn’t have rolled credits without the developers’ hints about how to progress near the end. By the time I received a response, my kids weren’t interested in playing any more.
Unlike some other family games I’ve played this year, I doubt Tukoni: Forest Keepers is a game most adults will enjoy on their own. The puzzles and minigames are either too simple or too obscure. Upon figuring out—or, in my case, being told—what the game wanted me to do, my response was generally not “Oh, I’m so clever” or “Boy, this game is clever,” but “What?” That’s what I’m supposed to do?” Additionally, because there is no dialogue, the story is rather simple.
This game desperately needs a tutorial. Show an animation of the avatar’s hand selecting an item and dragging it to a spot in the environment, which makes something happen. I would have appreciated a mapping of keyboard controls in the pause menu and some accessibility options such as being able to toggle running. The default movement speed is so slow that I wanted to run all the time, and not everyone is going to be able to hold down a button for extended periods. The hint system is appreciated but could be expanded. The last thing I want to do in a game like this is to have to stop playing to watch a walkthrough on YouTube.
Tukoni: Forest Keepers is a game to play with kids who are drawn to the art style, but expect to explain adventure game mechanics to them, and even then, the challenges of the controls may mean that you end up playing much of this yourself.
