LifeisXbox’s Greak: Memories of Azur review | Some games manage to grab your attention with their trailer and screenshots and get you hooked even before you start playing. Then once you start playing, a stunning opening scene reassures you that this game is going to take you on a beautiful adventure. Greak: Memories of Azur did exactly all of this. This recently released game, developed by Navegante Entertainment and published by Team17, turned out to be an even better game than I thought it would be. Greak: Memories of Azur is a single-player puzzle-platformer adventure game that will have you playing as three different characters. Greak, Adara, and Raydel are siblings travelling through the lands of Azur. It’s Greak’s mission to reunite him, his brother and his sister so they escape the lands of Azur by building an airship.
We played Greak: Memories of Azur for 8 hours on Nintendo Switch. This game is also available on Xbox, PC, and PlayStation.
This is a second opinion review without a score. We previously reviewed this game on Xbox Series S, you can read that review here.
What we liked!
- Hand-drawn art and cinematics | Greak: Memories of Azur starts with a beautiful, albeit a little confusing, opening scene. When I was watching this for the first time, I immediately knew I was going to be head over heels in love with the artstyle in this game. And I was completely right, of course, so the graphics are the first point I’ll be talking about. When you start a new game, a little more background is given in a cut-scene, so the opening scene makes more sense. These beautiful cinematics continue to appear throughout your adventures, and truly elaborate on the story in the best way possible. Besides the cinematics, I also really enjoyed the overall art style of the game itself. I always found myself travelling through a world of wonder, enjoying the view, and really taking everything in. It was a great choice of the developers to make the heros in this game rather small, so you can fully enjoy your surroundings!
- The power of siblings | You start by playing as the youngest sibling of three. Greak, who is obviously the main character of this game, was probably also my favourite but I must say, I enjoyed taking control of all three characters so much! You’ll find your sister Adara pretty quickly, but of course, you’ll lose her once more so you’ll find have to track her down again. Last, but definitely not least, you will meet Raydel, but you’ll need to have some patience before finding this one. Combining your three characters is key in this beautiful game. Only by using their abilities and by working together as a team can they travel towards their destinations. You see, using multiple characters is a crucial part of Greak: Memories of Azur since it is essential to solving the puzzles. And you might think that controlling two or three characters at once is a pain in the ass, but I’m here to assure you that this is definitely not the case for this game. I was a bit worried that switching between characters would be difficult and tacky work, but I’m quite impressed by how well the developers handled it in Greak: Memories of Azur. You can easily go from one character to the other by the click of a button, or you can control them at the same time by holding down the ZL button on your Switch. When you do split up and you want to quickly regroup, you can just press the ZR button (within a fairly short distance) and the character you’re not controlling will run towards the character you are playing as at the moment. It helps that all characters have their own inventory so you can carry twice or three times as much, and that was very necessary, but more on this later. It all just runs very smoothly and I did get the hang of the whole thing really quick!
- Puzzles | I do enjoy some balanced puzzles that aren’t too easy to figure out but also don’t require you to spend ages on solving them. Greak, Adara and Raydel have to travel through an interconnected world in order to find the missing pieces of an airship so they escape their homeworld. Getting to these scattered pieces comes with its challenges, and some fine puzzles were implemented in the wonderful world of Azur. They never got boring or repetitive, and they always ensured a certain challenge without the player feeling overpowered. I do believe that the combination of a beautiful hand-drawn world and exciting puzzles makes Greak: Memories of Azur one of my favourite Switch releases this year!
- Soundtrack | What better way to compliment a game with beautiful graphics, then to also introduce a marvellous soundtrack? The soundtrack was very clearly created for the exact purpose of this game, and it melts together in the most beautiful way. The music sets the scene for your adventure and boss fights provide an exciting musical component to give the challenge some extra spice. On top of that, all sound effects are in place, giving the player a great experience altogether.
Somewhere between
- Enemies | You’ll be facing a lot of enemies, and they actually respawn sometimes so better get out of somewhere quick. There are basic enemies, and bosses. The opponents you’ll meet along the way are usually fairly easy to defeat, which took away a bit of the challenge. I didn’t mind that much, but I would’ve enjoyed an increase in difficulty when it comes to enemies, and that was not the case in Greak: Memories of Azur. Another small issue I had with the enemies was the limited variety. I kept running into the same types and got a little sick of them eventually. The bosses did provide a fiar challenge, however.
- Inventory | I hate small inventories so much. And unfortunately, the characters in Greak: Memories of Azur seems to be carrying the smallest backpages possible. With only a few slots per characters, your inventory fills up really fast and this might get on your nerves like it did on mine. Luckily, multiple characters means multiple inventories, but still, if my other character isn’t near me, I’d like to still be able to pick something up that I desperately need.
What we disliked
- Cooking | Personally, I think they could have left out the cooking feature. I nearly never used it, simply because your inventory is quite limited already (for sure if you’re just controlling one character), so I never really carried a lot of ingredients. Cooking pots appear quite often in the world of Azur, which I found a bit unnecessary. Also, there is no way to keep track of how to create certain potions because the game does not offer any kind of recipe book. I honestly could do without the cooking feature altogheter.
- Small text | I’m guessing this is mostly a Switch related problem, and maybe even just a Switch Lite related problem but damn, that text was too small to read sometimes. I mean, dialogue was never an issue to follow, but once I dove into my inventory and wanted to read the descriptions for the items in there, I had the most difficult time to read those one or two little lines. I have very good eye sight so I think people who don’t, might not be able to read this AT ALL.
How long to beat the story | 6 to 10 hours
How long to achieve 1000G | Switch has no achievements.
Similar with | Hollow Knight
CONCLUSION
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Head of PC team. PC, Switch, and Xbox game reviewer. Also a marketeer, concert and animal lover, and photographer in training 🙂
Steam: Mauitje
Xbox: Mauitjexo
