Röki

A debut built on Scandinavian folklore

Röki is Polygon Treehouse's first release, and it's an unusually confident debut. Founded by Alex Kanaris-Sotiriou, a PlayStation and Guerrilla Games alumnus, the Dundee-based studio built a point-and-click adventure around Tove, a young girl venturing into a snowbound wilderness in search of her missing brother, guided and hindered in turn by trolls, ravens, a Tomte and other figures drawn from Scandinavian folklore. It's a fairy tale in the classical sense — dark, melancholic, ultimately about grief and redemption rather than whimsy — and both critics and players responded to that tone as much as to any individual puzzle or mechanic.

The critical reception backs that up clearly: 78 on OpenCritic, its "Strong" tier, placing Röki in the top 25% of reviewed games with 78% of 65 critics recommending it. Steam's player base lands in almost the same place independently — Very Positive, 91.5% of 1,395 reviews as of this writing. For a debut studio's first game, that's a genuinely strong showing, and the reasons given are consistent: striking, hand-crafted art direction, a well-realised folklore world, and a story critics and players alike describe as emotionally grounded rather than a generic fantasy quest.

What holds it back, said the same way for six years

The 8.5% of Steam reviewers who don't recommend Röki, and a meaningful share of critics even within otherwise positive reviews, converge on a specific, consistent complaint that shows up in nearly identical language across the entire six-year review history: pacing. "Röki is a beautiful game. That, sadly, is all the praise I can give it," reads a review from three weeks after launch, going on to describe the puzzle structure as repetitive item-gathering with too much backtracking across a limited handful of connected areas. A review from 2023, nearly three years later, makes almost the identical point in different words: "it was really slow, there is a lot of backtracking, character interactions unnecessary that stopped the flow of the game."

Several detailed reviews get more specific about where that slowness lives: dialogue and animation sequences with no option to skip or speed up, which compounds the backtracking problem rather than offsetting it. One review from 2025 singles out a boss-style encounter — the Spider sequence — as a concrete example: "locking you in to incredibly slow animations in what should be a fast-paced fight." Puzzle logic comes in for related criticism; multiple reviewers describe item combinations that made sense only in retrospect, a common adventure-game failure mode but one raised often enough here to be worth flagging rather than dismissing as individual frustration. Voice acting is a smaller, but also repeated, complaint — several reviews contrast it unfavourably with the strength of the writing and visual presentation around it, including one player who specifically bought the soundtrack DLC and rated the music far above the voice work in the base game.

Verdict

Röki is a genuinely strong debut — a well-told, well-designed folklore story from a studio that clearly understood atmosphere and art direction from its first release, and both critics and the large majority of its Steam audience rate it accordingly. The recurring complaint about pacing, backtracking and slow, unskippable sequences isn't noise — it's the same specific critique, made in similar terms, across six years of reviews from people who otherwise liked the game a great deal. That's worth taking as a genuine design trade-off rather than a flaw that got fixed and forgotten: if a slower, more deliberate adventure-game pace is something you enjoy, Röki's story and world are very much worth the time; if repetitive backtracking is a dealbreaker for you specifically, this review's own sources say you're not alone in finding it one.