Video games are an ideal medium to hang out with virtual animal companions. You’ve got games entirely centered on beloved furry friends like Nintendogs and the Pokémon series, as well as recognisable characters like Dogmeat from Fallout (rest in peace, mo-cap dog River), bird dog Trico from The Last Guardian and, my personal recent favourite, the titular mystical wolf in last year’s Neva. Entering this pantheon of games that allow you to play alongside a beloved furry friend is Koira, a deftly designed and thoughtful casual adventure game centered around your relationship with a saved puppy.

Koira is published by DON’T NOD and is the debut game from Brussels-based Studio Tolima. It follows the player as a woodland spirit who awakens in a mystical forest and befriends a puppy caught in a snare. Together, they decide to venture across the forest to find a place to call home while discovering its secrets and avoiding a band of threatening hunters.

Koira fits neatly into a lineage of indie adventure games like Journey and ABZÛ, whose experiences decenter mechanical density in favour of mood and narrative, and for players who gravitate towards those experiences (myself included), Koira is a delight. For a debut title of fairly small scale, Koira is a remarkably assured, thoughtful and effective experience whose ambitions may be straightforward but are nonetheless highly effective. Its central journey may be a familiar one, but it’s one that evokes similar feelings to classic fables and fairy tales, and is well worth playing for anyone who either loves an animal companion or simply appreciates a soothing and satisfying game narrative.

Koira’s strongest design choice is its approach to sound. Not only is the game dialogue-free, all of its language is replaced by music – calling your dog becomes a gentle flute, the chatter of birds evokes wind chimes in the breeze, boars rumble like trombones and the dog itself makes the sound of a squeaky horn you’d hear attached to a children’s bike. It’s a great design decision that imbues the game with the feel of a classic animation being accompanied by music. While one might immediately draw comparisons to the reactive soundtrack of Untitled Goose Game (shout out to my PhD supervisor Dan Golding who arranged that music), the effect here is extremely different in both its pace and tone; whereas Goose Game elicited a vaudeville-like comedic atmosphere, Koira instead revels in serenity and quiet charm, the musical ‘dialogue’ feeling like a gentle accompaniment that ebbs and flows based on character interactions.

Not only does the game itself draw plenty from classic fables that have been adapted by Disney, as well as more specific titles like The Fox and the Hound and Snow White, but this approach specifically made me think of Fantasia and its deep interweaving of orchestral music with animation. While Koira is obviously far more modest in its accomplishments, and part of me would love to see another game take some of these ideas further, it nonetheless speaks to how effective and charming the game’s world is when every action is marked by your own personal woodwind and brass section.

Unlike some other narrative adventure games which are entirely centred on exploration and story, Koira also has several light puzzles to solve and encounters to overcome. None of these are particularly challenging, and the puzzles break up the rhythm of other activities nicely. If I was ever stuck it was typically just a matter of poking and prodding at the environment until the solution made itself apparent. There are a couple of stealth sections where the difficulty strangely spikes, though – while they do add to the tonal balance through the tension they evoke, getting stuck on them, even briefly, can become tedious quickly.

The art direction has a soft and painterly look that is pleasant and clean, if a little unremarkable. I would probably have a hard time picking screenshots of Koira amongst a lineup of similar titles. The environmental design also misses in how it struggles with variety and lacks the range of distinct locations that other journey-oriented games involve. This means, outside of increasing tundra, the player isn’t exposed to much visual progression, which does weaken the spatial component of the journey it’s trying to represent. It’s far from a big problem, though – the art direction and level design are otherwise extremely readable and make navigation quite satisfying. The character models, while largely black blobs, express a lot with very little, too. The hunters, in particular, appropriately appear more demonic than human with their tall physiques, peering eyes and clawed hands.