Out now on PC and Apple Arcade.
Amanita Design, the studio behind the wonderful likes of Machinarium, Samorost, Botanicula, and Chuchel, has surprise-released Pilgrims, a brand-new offbeat adventure that’s out now on Apple Arcade and PC.
Pilgrims, which begins with a priest losing his soul to a demon in a card game, plays out something like a point-and-click adventure distilled to its purest form. It’s a game consisting of numerous small, single-scene story vignettes, each accessible via a lavish overworld map, and each usually involving an encounter with a quirky character in need of assistance.
By prodding each scene, you’re able to add new characters and objects to your inventory as cards, and these, in turn, can be dragged back out of the deck at new locations as required. The goal, then, is to experiment with card combinations, find a solution to appease each character, and move on.
It’s all delivered with Amanita’s typically flawless presentation, in this case, all thicks lines and earthy tones, and with a wonderfully offbeat sense of humour. What makes it particularly appealing, however, is its emphasis on playful experimentation.
As the developer puts it on Pilgrims’ Steam page, “Don’t beat it – play with it!”, and the joy comes as much from seeing the amusing, often unexpected, way that an “incorrect” combination of items interact, as it does from successfully solving a particular problem. And that playfulness is encouraged still further by a huge number of achievements tied to more unorthodox tinkering.
Pilgrims is available to download now as part of Apple’s Arcade gaming subscription service, or you can pick it up on Steam, the Humble Store, and GOG for £4.99.
