Indie Game of the Week 458: Nairi: Tower of Shirin

The pendulum of IGotW has swung back around to another favored genre of mine, the classic point-and-click graphic adventure, and so here we have 2018's Nairi: Tower of Shirin from Dutch team HomeBearStudio. It follows a sheltered noble girl named Nairi who is suddenly required to depart her home after the royal guards arrive to arrest her parents in a plot she lacks the context to understand. After unsuccessfully being smuggled out of the city of Shirin she falls in with a group of cat bandits—this being a world where humans and anthros coexist—that robbed the wagon that was transporting her and after a few empowering misadventures she's ready to stop feeling sorry for herself, sneak back into Shirin, and find a way to spring her parents and figure out why they were detained in the first place. The game uses a first-person perspective with a context-sensitive morphing cursor for examinations and traversal: it's all very accessible stuff without much in the way of embellishments or action sequences.

The first-person perspective is an intriguing choice for the point-and-click genre, in part because it used to be the domain of Legend Entertainment—I've written about several of their games in the past—but more recently it's been appropriated almost entirely by the megalithic HOPA (Hidden Object Puzzle Adventure) subgenre: I suspect it's because not having to draw the protagonist or animate/program their walk cycles makes things easier for the developers without them necessarily having to compromise on backgrounds, puzzles, or storytelling (at least two of which are of paramount importance to adventure game fans). That said, NPCs typically appear while exploring and they all have this decent hand-drawn quality to them—the first animation you see when booting up is the developer's logo, that of a donut-munching bear carefully sitting down at a computer to start work, is also Disney-esque—so I'm guessing the lack of an on-screen (except in talking portrait dialogue scenes) protagonist was more of a stylistic choice than anything else. The game's aesthetic in general is strong, going with the slightly more uncommon setting of a middle-eastern/Mesopotamian desert city—a fitting place for the titular eyesore of a central enormous edifice built to commune with the divine—that affords a lot of nice One Thousand and One Nights visual flair without getting too bogged down with tropes, and the mischievous sweetness of the core narrative provides a kid-friendly adventuresome spirit germane to its aforementioned Disneyian cast of cute anthros. (I suspect the artist was also inspired by Koji Takahashi's work on Animal Crossing, but maybe that's just me extrapolating from the protagonist's dopey expression.)

You'll never find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy and quacking.

Most of the puzzles are fairly standard adventure game fare: you're usually limited to a handful of screens and hotspots with a small inventory of items to find (they're a little more high-def than the rest of the environments to help distinguish them) and apply where needed. A minor incidental fetch quest of sorts is picking up random coins from containers and lanterns while exploring: these coins factor into the story very briefly at a couple of points when you're required to buy something and even then you can find way more than you'll ever need. Still, this side-activity gives you something to scour the screen for, which only helps players further appreciate the detail that goes into many of these scenes—I did not find any Hidden Object tableaux to pore over, which at least disqualifies this game from being "one of those", though it does have a few non-inventory puzzles like deciphering a code or turning circles around to make a picture. These more elaborate puzzles appear in the game's two "dungeon" type areas, both relating to the ancient peoples who used to occupy the city of Shirin and left warnings behind of a cyclical apocalyptic danger that you have to discern.

It's a charming, relatively brisk adventure that isn't really interested in keeping you stunlocked by difficult puzzles when it has a story to tell—adventure games often having to juggle a well-paced story and gameplay that might potentially delay that pacing for an untold while—though I still had a few issues with it. Primarily, one that affects a lot of adventure games both classic and new: there's so many screens where nothing happens besides some incidental NPC dialogue or a coin collectible, along with no real way to quickly move through all these liminal locations to where the actual important stuff happens. A bar run by ducks, for example, takes about six or seven clicks to reach from the main hub area of the poor district which links to the other areas and even when new areas open up later you'll still occasionally need to head back there for a handful of objectives. Clicking through the same half-dozen screens gets old after a while, even if it's only a few seconds per transition for each, and drags the game down just as much as any roadblocking puzzle might. There's also no in-game map that I could find that would make some of the more maze-like areas easier to navigate, like an early part of the game set in the lower floors of the titular tower with a couple of passageways that have to be navigated by raising and lowering doors via levers found elsewhere. If this game takes more than five hours to beat it's because you're spending half that time just heading to places. Sadly, the game is just about that size where the devs don't feel like the areas are quite big enough to necessitate coding in a whole fast-travel system though some players might beg to differ. Then there's the fact that it ends mid-story with a cliffhanger which, while disappointing, is sort of necessary when you have a yarn longer than your balance sheet and need to get something out the door to pay off your creditors; fortunately, it appears a second game did eventually transpire in 2024 (a mere six years later, so hopefully it came with a story recap) which I've already put on my wishlist as a future IGotW entry. Sounds like the devs are already working on a Part 3 though, so I think I can hold out for a sale.

Imagine being buried with a puzzle solution on your chest. That'll keep the graverobbers away. Also, I guess TIL that bear ears are solid bone.

On the whole, though, I like the setting and cute visuals of the game as well as its confident storytelling, which makes uses of minimally animated storybook cutscenes and flashbacks during the downtime between the longer sections where you're running around solving puzzles, and it's gentle enough to be suited for younger audiences in addition to the more grizzled point-and-click adventure fanbase—many of whom have been attached to this genre since the Sierra/LucasArts eras and are eager to explore any worthy spiritual descendants that come along. Small irritations don't do enough to diminish its core appeal and although it may still move a bit slowly at times with all the hoofing around involved I found the puzzles enjoyable enough, especially those times when they got a bit more involved than giving items to the right people. A thoroughly pleasant little adventure game with a bit of drama and mystery to it, if not something that manages (or is even attempting) to push the envelope for video games as a storytelling medium. But hey, with how expansive and varied adventure gaming has become in the past decade with all its many authorial talents, that'd be an order as tall as the tower of Shirin itself.

Rating: 4 out of 5.

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