By Chris Picone, 21 April 2024

Rauniot is an intriguing new point & click adventure set in a post-apocalyptic retro 70s Finland.  You play as Aino, a very capable young woman acting as an agent for one of the survivor groups, tasked with the mission of finding a lost friend who was sent out looking for a long-lost piece of technology that could be pivotal for future survival - or to complete the mission if he is already dead. 

Rauniot immediately thrusts you into the story; you are alone with your car, a pistol, a box of tools, and not much else as you pull into a seemingly abandoned out-of-town petrol station.  The artwork and attention to detail - the main game graphics in particular but also the accompanying art pieces on the load screens - is fantastic and immediately draws you into the world.  The world's a desolate place; not just the environment with its run-down buildings crawling with overgrown vines and weeds, but the people.  It's a difficult world to stay alive in; everyone comes with some tragic backstory and a loose set of morals.  It's hard to work out who to trust.  There is some dialogue in the game.  Some of the character artwork seems out of place here but the discussions themselves are interesting and help fill the gaps in your world knowledge in a natural way.  They're all voiced, too, albeit in Finnish, which I don't understand a lick of.  Oddly, I don't find this detracts from the game at all. The voices fit the world and everything's captioned.  Puzzles feature strongly in Rauniot, but they're integrated into the game well so you don't feel like you're stop-starting or jumping between puzzles and exploration, it all just flows seamlessly.  There's a decent range of puzzles too, mostly logical, although I was stuck for a little while on one pixel hunt.  I'm about three hours in so far - I started playing pre-release so no game guides were available yet and some of the puzzles took me longer to work out than others.  Unfortunately this means I'm not quite far in enough yet to have a good understanding of how much choice & consequence exists in the game but I suspect probably not a whole lot. But the characters and story and puzzles are all engaging so I'm happy just to be along for the ride.

The verdict?  There are a few imperfections - translating any language to English is never perfect, the character art's slightly sub-par, and there is some slight obfuscation with some of the puzzles.  But overall Rauniot is a very solid point and click experience with dark, gritty characters and an engaging world and story, I'm thoroughly sold on it - this is one title I will be playing through to the end.

 Links:

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1168490/Rauniot/