Scribble your way out of this one!
MIRU
Designer: Hinokodo | Publisher: Mimic Publishing Collective
Can you kill a god? Is it worth a punt? That is the question of this exiting little book of hexscribbling and dice rolling.
Miru is a small indie analogue adventure with some really quite big ideas within. We often talk about the ability of little solo adventure games to pack a much bigger punch than we expected because of the way they light-up your imaginative landscape when playing them. It’s often about the idea that this is a tool for cracking open some of your own creative potential in an ad-libbing, unexpected way.
That isn’t the case here. What we have instead is something entirely different. Something… cinematic.
It’s 100 years in the future and your brother was just killed by a robot. You’ve decided to kill god as a sensible and measured reaction to this grief and loss. This anime-esque set-up is less bombastic feeling the more you explore the (very well written) world of Miru. As you explore the tone shifts from ‘why are these robots here?’ to a Children of Men or The Last of Us feeling of a sad but not always truly evil, world.
Your quest to kill the robot god – the thing that is to blame for the death of your brother, as, after all, the robots must be doing the bidding of this creature – comes in the form of exploring the world around you until you encounter it. Like nearly all mapping games, when you start out, you don’t know how you’re going to complete your mission, but you’re best of strike out on a course anyway and hoping for the best.
The game asks you to roll biomes and events for location, each written in a kind of languishing fallen-America style (a little bit sad the world is over, sort of happy not to be at work), and asks you to spend food and resources to survive. Sometimes you’ll run into a natural encounter (a bear!) or into something tougher (a big robot!) and this might be the end of you. Your scribbles soon add up to a world that seems natural enough – and definitely hexcrawl-worthy.
More interestingly is how the calendar works, every day is marked off as you would expect, and when you hit certain days, a god event happens. These events are special and often require changing the map in some way. They feel like the backbone of the story, and give the whole thing that cinematic feel.
The places you visit on your journey aren’t always empty too. This isn’t a totally dead world, just one that’s been flattened a little. Sometimes you’re too late to help, sometimes you’re admonished by your elders. Either way the place feels alive not in an a totally organic sense, but more like in a videogame where you run into a different character at the same location at different times of day. For all that, it’s a great entry into the world of surviving-and-drawing-your-wayto-victory.
CHRISTOPHER JOHN EGGETT
WE SAY
This map-making adventure through a new world is in parts an abstract game of locations, and part exploration. Cinematic with a little crunch. Brilliant.
TRY THIS IF YOU LIKED DELVE…
Like to scribble your way to victory? Then Miru is a good place to emerge after you’ve managed to drown all of your dwarves in Delve.