Creaks

Creaks is a puzzle platformer from Amanita Design in which the main character discovers a mysterious underground world full of shadow creatures behind the wall of his room. When lit up, these beings turn into solid, harmless furniture, but when the light goes out they set off after the player again - and this principle of light and shadow forms the basis of most of the puzzles, where the player must time the lighting of lamps, the moving of furniture and jumps between platforms to get further. New types of creatures and switches are gradually added, forcing the player to combine light and shadow in increasingly elaborate ways. The game progresses through individual chapters, each of which introduces new mechanisms and rules of light and shadow, so the player never feels like the game's principles are repeating without progression. The controls remain simple and intuitive throughout, making the game accessible even to players with little experience with puzzle platformers.

Visually, the game combines a dark, painterly environment with strong color accents and characters reminiscent of the studio's classic adventure-game art, just shifted into platformer mechanics with fluid animation and full background parallax. The music and sound design create a mysterious, dreamlike atmosphere of an underground labyrinth, where silence alternates with creaking wood and the footsteps of shadow creatures, and the player moves the entire time along the edge between fairy-tale coziness and quiet tension. The difficulty of the puzzles gradually increases as the game introduces new types of furniture and mechanisms, without unnecessarily overwhelming the player with explanations or text.

Creaks built on Amanita Design's reputation as a studio with a distinctive visual style and clever but never frustrating puzzles that respect the player's pace. The game showed that the shift from a classic adventure to a platformer suits the studio well, and became another example of how atmosphere, visual style and game mechanics can be fused into one indivisible whole, without one element pulling away from another.

Why play it: For players who love clever but never frustrating puzzles set in a strong visual atmosphere, Creaks shows that Amanita Design's adventure-game style works brilliantly in a platformer too.