Koira
Koira is the story of two creatures – a long-eared moppet and a dog – exploring an enchanted wilderness as they try to get home. You control the moppet, and the moppet controls the dog, directing it to dig paths under fences and dispel scary black clouds of fog at the push of an on-screen button.
If that sounds like the kind of thing that would be well suited to the pages of a children’s picture book, that’s because Koira feels like a picture book perhaps more than it feels like a game. The winter-tinged visual design invokes the powdery watercolours of a great kids’ book illustrator such as Jon Klassen, an artist with a similar skill at crafting everything from trees to sprouting mushrooms with a few brisk lines. Elsewhere, alongside simple puzzles there’s a childlike delight in play for its own sake. A snowball, for example, might be used to dislodge a key you’ll need to open a gate, but it might also just be an invitation to spend 15 minutes larking about before moving on.