Uku Demo

There are many religions out there that attribute various phenomena to holy beings, such as thunder, rain, or even abstract concepts such as crop fertility and love. However, people also found ways to worship them and even give tribute in order to keep them happy. Naturally, disasters still happened every now and again, because mother nature is pretty difficult to please.

Uku is a simple platformer in which you play the role of a young villager trying to complete a ritual to appease the Goddess of Fire. She has recently become upset with his tribe, which is why the nearby volcano erupts and is about to flood the village with deadly lava. Thankfully, your character might be able to do something about it, especially if he follows his instincts.

The gameplay is about as simple as it can get in the genre, since all you have to do is jump from one platform to the other and avoid the lava that rises from the bottom. You also have the chance to collect a couple of flowers you find along the way, and although it’s pretty important to do so, it’s not actually mandatory in order to finish the game. However, you probably won’t be satisfied with the ending.

Besides the lava, you also have to watch out for night watchers, which are quite dangerous if you are not aware of their powers. In short, their gaze causes instant death, especially if you are facing them. Hence, in order to avoid this and not have to restart the entire game, you have to close your eyes and wait for the gaze to stop. This becomes a tad more difficult once you have to deal with more than once watcher.

The disappointing part is that the experience is rather short, even for a demo. Besides that, the vertical scroll is a bit too slow, and maybe it would be a good idea to scale down the platforms and the characters a bit, so that more content can fit on the screen at the same time. Thankfully, the controls are spot on, which is always good news in a platformer.

In the end, Uku is definitely not a bad game, but it fails to impress the audience in any way. Hence, the developers should really work on the presentation, or at least include more exciting gameplay mechanics.