Game EXP: Tukoni (PC)

Tukoni

Systems: PC/Steam, Android, iOS

Release Date: November 19, 2020

Publisher: Oksana Bula & Alexey Furman

Developer: Oksana Bula, Alexey Furman, & Alexey Sysoiev
Time Spent: ~30 minutes

I am admittedly a sucker for a free game (my catalog of games from Epic and Amazon is a testament to that) and since my phone got wind of that bit of information, I now get semi-regular non-notification notifications from sites such as GAMINGbible, thegamer, and occasionally PCGamer announcing various free games; typically on Steam since the Epic Games Store and Amazon actually advertise themselves the games that they are giving away for free.  This was how I found out about Tukoni and what jumped out at me was the description that it is a point-and-click game based on the art and stories of Ukrainian children's book author Oksana Bula, and would you just look at that character art!

Tukoni is just that.  It is a point-and-click game about a fantastical woodland creature who is small enough to have an acorn for its backpack, but at the same time, interacts with wild boar and squirrels that are of a similar size.  Realism is not the point of this game as Tukoni uses a single dew droplet to make tea and uses a rotary dial phone to call other woodland creatures.  You find objects to pick up and interact with by moving the cursor over the screen and when Tukoni's paw appears, you can perform an action such as move a leaf or pick a mushroom.  There is a "talk" button that allows Tukoni to either talk to themselves or other creatures to help them parse what the solution to the puzzle is supposed to be.  Tukoni even has a hint book that shows you how to proceed through the puzzle after you have collected all of the necessary pieces to that puzzle.  The beautiful part about the speech in this game is that it is all done through illustrations with no words, so there is no need to have various language translations, and literally, anyone can play this game regardless of their native language.

This game is very short, taking me about 30 minutes, with maybe 5 minutes spent trying to figure out why a solution to a puzzle was not working and a lot of it ended up being that I again was overthinking things.  There are, maybe, about four to five puzzles in the game, although I know that there was an optional puzzle I did not complete because I was not expecting to finish the game when I did.  One of those, "Let me do this solution and I will see where I can use this bird in the next area" and the game was over.  That the game was so short was probably the most disappointing thing about the game.  I loved the puzzles, some as simple as combining two objects and putting combined objects from your inventory on an object on the screen.  Some of the puzzles auto-completed themselves after completing the first of a three-step process with the game essentially taking over

I loved the story-book aesthetic which matches the art from Oksana Bula's books and the music was wonderfully fitting with the colored pencil/watercolor fae-woodland-inspired artwork.  Had this game been three hours longer with no change to the format, I would have happily paid money for it and loved every minute of it.  Because the puzzles were not complicated, it offered a point-and-click adventure experience that was not marred by overly full inventory screens, constant clicking trying to find anything new to interact with or backtracking to/from locations to artificially draw out the length of the game.  Steam only has this one game attributed to everyone listed as a developer and producer and I could not find anything else by way of a video game to play further and throw my money at.  There is Oksana's Etsy shop which does offer an English translation companion to one of her graphic novels as well as other forms of physicalized art.  I did reach out to Oksana Bula through her webpage but have not received a response, possibly because Ukraine is still in a war defending their country from Russia's unfounded aggression and her city was attacked as recently as July 6th.

~JWfW/JDub/The Faceplantman/Jaconian
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