Reka backs up its cozy folk-horror atmosphere with some buggy frustrations that leave me unsure how to feel about it. There’s both a lot and a little to do, and despite its technical frailties I can’t entirely say I don’t like the game. You make your way through an ancient woodland, meeting villagers and fae creatures as you find resources necessary to customize your chicken-legged witch hut. Whether you have a positive experience depends on how interested you are in aesthetics as reward, and the journey over the destination.
Of characterization you receive little to none. You begin by making a character with an extremely basic customization screen. This is helped by the many options you receive later for clothing and hairstyles, though the few facial options are so similar I don’t know why they bothered not making a single character. From there you wander into a village and meet its beleaguered townsfolk. They, along with other people and creatures you will meet in the game, have small quests for you to complete. The reward for these quests, indeed for every quest in the game, will be items to customize your house.
The quest system is interesting in its subtlety. No one tells you these quests exist; you have to speak to the people out of your own curiosity. The solutions are not marked on a map, tasking you with exploring on your own. The enchanted woodland is a somber place, a hanged man you’re searching for blends into the background just as much as the trees or flowers. Completing quests requires curiosity and patience, and in its small levels does not tire you out with tedium. It would help a ton to have a minimap, in this navigation-focused experience, but none is present. Instead you’ll spend far too much time opening the map, turning a bit, and opening it again to find your target.
In a different game, I would find Reka’s contemplative wandering more compelling. The quest design is definitely more conducive to a memorable experience than the average modern slop-fest. If I felt like there was more meat to this game, I would be able to praise it unreservedly.
The soundtrack is probably Reka’s greatest strength. Its great melancholy instrumental pieces are at the same time pastoral and ominous. It sets the tone very well, melding the kind of beauty and awe that I’ve experienced in many a Transcendental landscape. While the art design helps back up this feeling, I can’t say the same for the graphics themselves. They are arguably serviceable on the Steam Deck but better on the PC. Both feature some awkward clipping and aggressive anti-aliasing that leaves what’s supposed to be a naturalistic game feeling artificial. At an early point you encounter a dissolving spire of bone; this effect could look gorgeous, with its organic qualities magically melting away, but my version of it was just as much a splash of white pixels.
Reka is also better to play on the PC because a controller leaves too many buttons doing the same thing depending on context. The things you do are mostly limited, outside of building. You have a set of magical tools like a lantern that lights important objects, pine branches that cleanse evil magic, or birds that collect resources for you. These birds are a pain, and they aren’t intended to be. Often you’ll find resources in a cluster. Berries, flowers, and grain are many individual items right next to one another. You’ll find yourself having to click the same button over and over to gather everything. This isn’t on purpose: you can hold down the button to have them keep gathering, or use an option in the menu to toggle auto-collection. My problem was that this option somehow turned off both options, forcing me to individually click on every single resource I wanted.
The general game loop is going out into the forest to collect resources and/or do fetch quests, and return to your witch hut. There you can experiment with cooking food, which it needs to travel. The house has legs that can walk, awkwardly and slowly, about the landscape. It follows you on foot or lets you pilot it, sticking to many objects as it goes. Trees will hilariously bend out of the way only to snap back the instant you step away. I didn’t know that eastern European forests were populated exclusively by rubber trees. The more you know.
All of that serves the end of customizing your house. Because of the many options for furniture, materials, walls, doors, and decorations, I foresee some people making some incredible creations here. I won’t be one of them, because of how painful and awkward it is to build the house. This is a central, defining function of the game, and it's one I found a massive headache.
The building tools are difficult enough to use that it feels like the game is actively fighting you. To start with, the controls bury everything in a series of menus that felt unintuitive to navigate. It takes a lot of effort to get to the item you want, and when you want to place it you almost always have to then fight to rotate it into place. There’s no way to place many items at once either. Building an entire wall asks you to set down each small piece one after another, moving into place each time. It also keeps assuming that I want every wall piece perpendicular to one another, something I almost never wanted to do. The controls to rotate objects are also sticky, sometimes not acknowledging my inputs at all or snapping to another incorrect orientation. You need to be extremely precise to get objects properly in place, but the controls make such precision extremely difficult.
Beyond that, the camera and building tools are locked to your character. Dropping an object requires your character, who takes up a good chunk of the screen, to be physically next to it (where she doesn’t do any kind of animation to add to the experience). You’ll have to position your character correctly, dodging furniture and staircases or the edge of the house itself, and often find yourself falling onto the next floor. There are also some actual bugs. I hung some decorative herb bags from a bit of ceiling
There is a “free camera” mode that is anything but. It moves the camera slightly farther away, but you can’t move the camera up or down unless you also move the character. The Gummy Ship from Kingdom Hearts had a more intuitive build menu for a more complicated result back in 2002. For a simple, cozy house decoration game I’m amazed this is such a chore. It’s the primary focus of the entire experience and I hated every second of it.
Reka does have some charm to offer interested builders, and comes at a good time shortly before the eve of all hallows. If you can make your way past its many blemishes, there is something memorable to uncover here. I’ll definitely remember it when Fireshine Games sends notice of its next game.
