Koira – PS5 Review

From Belgian indie Studio Tolima publisher Don’t Nod we have the very cute Koira. We’ve had it for a little while, but due to a bug halting our progress altogether, it rather put the skids on our playthrough. Thankfully a patch solved the problem we were able to revisit Koira a little later than we originally anticipated.

What initially attracted us was the cute, mostly monochrome art direction, all stark black and whites. The crux of Koira is that you find a cute puppy abandoned in a snowy forest, we were reminded of the Ardennes forests as depicted in Band of Brothers take on the Battle of the Bulge in late 1944.

Though instead of indiscriminate artillery strikes and bitterly cold trench warfare, instead you have vaguely evil hunter types trying to catch your player character. They might be called Koira, but that could just as easily be the name of the dog. We don’t know anyway as the story, such as it is, is told entirely wordlessly. A bit like a shadow puppet play we suppose.

The initial part of the game introduces a few key mechanics including dispatching clouds and hide and seek. The latter was where we encountered the game halting bug that stopped our proceeding any further, slightly more gallingly as it was a fair while after the prior checkpoint.

As we mentioned earlier, since the bug was reproducible and we suspect we can’t have been the only player to have encountered it, the dev was able to get a patch out. Though not before we’d reviewed several other games in the intervening period. It’s a definite positive that a small boutique developer with, we suspect, limited resources was able to fix this issue. We’ve encountered other games in the past where bugs never got resolved upon our having highlighted issues and in a few egregious cases, they remain unpatched to this day.

The hide and seek part has you taking turns with your dog to seek each other out. As is the case with many of the set pieces you’ll encounter in Koira, there’s an associated trophy. In this case for successfully hiding from your dog for more than thirty seconds. You’ll have to use the same mechanic to hide from them hunter types, though in practice their big snarling dogs will home in on you and you’ll get your face eaten off.

There’s no gore here, the depiction of the main antagonists being more symbolic than anything. We were reminded of the themes explored in Prokofiev’s Peter and The Wolf to some extent, though rather than the big bad wolf being the enemy, it’s the hunters. The music is rather more low-key with no real use of leitmotif in evidence.

However, there is a light musical theme throughout Koira with which your character and his dog communicate, with occasional associated puzzles involving stone statues. It’s all rather vague, but you’ll generally never get particularly stuck during your playthrough. The music never gets quite as involved as Melobot thankfully, but it was evocative of the way that used musical themes throughout.

There’s other animals you’ll encounter throughout Koira such as rabbits, birds and most significantly, wild boar. You’ll have the opportunity to throw snowballs at all of these too. With the same snowballs, there’s a cute set piece in which you can build snowmen. And yes, another trophy to get.

Koira isn’t massively long, even taking into account our extended break, we probably only clocked three hours maximum. There’s a handy chapter select so you can revisit areas with specific associated trophies, we missed a few due to not realising certain sections required perfect runs to do so.

We had the occasional issue with controls, especially during the few chase sequences where we found ourselves coming unstuck, but they were minor and the restart checkpoints weren’t too onerous.

In conclusion, Koira is a cute, if a little brief, romp exploring the bond between your character and his dog. The set pieces are well done, you’ll excuse us for not going into them in too much depth lest we spoil them for you. The art style is striking and the general feeling is one of a light and airy confection as opposed to anything massively deep. That’s OK though. There’s more here than, say a hidden object cat game at least. Finally, the devs should be applauded for addressing the bugs that affected our progress a couple months ago, that’s a bigger level of commitment than many others.