Bokida – Heartfelt Reunion Review

Bokida – Heartfelt Reunion is an abstract and surreal puzzling experience. Played from the first-person perspective, you explore a monochromatic open world and uncover the surprising wonder hidden within. With the ability to conjure blocks and slice those blocks into new shapes, the game will have you use the few skills you possess to solve its puzzles and progress its story.

The game has a very unique style to it. Entering into the open world landscape you’ll be met with intricately detailed architecture made with Minecraft style cubes. Everything around you is also white, meaning that landscapes and structures blur into one another and detail can be lost from a distance. The white world is very eye catching and unique to this game, although after spending a decent amount of time in the world, it did begin to weigh on me. Not noticing detail lost in the lack of colour or even just developing mild eye strain wasn’t fun. Having said that, even with its simple visual style, Bokida managed to impress me on multiple occasions with its architecture and the wondrous environments it was able to create. When the game added colour into its palette in fleeting sections, it was equal parts memorising and relieving.

There was also a lot of surrealism to Bokida’s story. The game is narrated in Korean, but even with English subtitles you never really understand what is going on. As you solve puzzles you grow a black shape in the sky that, as the game progresses, starts to become menacingly big. You can read into the game’s story as darkness taking over the white purity, but in the end the game does shape the story into a sought of ‘yin yang’ philosophy. So whether your actions were for the betterment of the environment or to its detriment is never really clear, and what the motivations of your character is never gets told, but this just allows players to form their own interpretation.

The game’s mechanics can be boiled down into 4 main abilities when it comes to puzzle solving. Creating blocks, slicing those blocks to cut off sections, pushing cut off sections away, and erasing blocks you have created. The game does give you more abilities down the line but they are less for puzzle solving and more for “cool factor”. Using these four abilities you solve puzzles within the environment such as mimicking block formations or guiding a beam of light and bouncing it off your perfectly sliced blocks.

Whilst puzzling may not have always hit the mark, the game did have occasional set pieces and abstract story moments that gave progressing through it a worthwhile pay-off. Discovering early on that the world loops vertically was great, the underwater section was great, the rocks that floated as you moved were great, even the ending had its pay-off. And it was these moments that had me wanting to continue to play Bokida to see what was coming next.