Guayota review for PC, Nintendo Switch

Guayota is a good example of a game that tries to do way too much. It has ideas, but it doesn’t know how to moderate them or reign them in, and the end result is a lot messier than it needs to or should be.

For starters, there’s its premise. The game is based on a culture that has almost certainly never gotten any representation in video games, drawing from the Canary Islands and Guanche mythology to tell a story about a search for the mythical St. Brendan’s Island.

It’s a cool idea, to be sure, but Guayota bogs it down in all kinds of unnecessary dialogue and exposition. I get that not many people will know the story – I certainly didn’t – but the game finds a way to tell it in the most boring way imaginable, with lengthy cutscenes and dialogues that go on far too long. No matter how much I wanted to know more about what was happening, I inevitably felt my attention wander every time I hit more dialogue, because I knew I was about to get drowned in useless information.

This same issue impacts Guayota’s gameplay. It’s a puzzle game, with each new level giving you more mythology to uncover as you solve the puzzles. Unfortunately, Guayota mucks everything up by needlessly overcomplicating things with punishments for failure that seem contrary to the spirit of the genre.

By this, I mean that one of the great things about puzzle games is working out what you’re supposed to do. In a normal course of events, you’ll come across a puzzle, and you’ll either pass it and move on to the next one, or you’ll fail and have to come up with a new approach for your next attempt.

Guayota’s problem is that it doesn’t allow that next attempt. If you fail at your first try, you get sent to a dark world where everything is exponentially harder. The dark world is full of invisible walls that only show up if you get too close, and all kinds of other traps that make solutions much more challenging. While it’s an interesting way to add some stakes to the daytime version of the world, it feels like the penalty for failure is much too high. You can sometimes die in the day world without even getting a chance to see what happened or how you could’ve avoided it, which feels like it goes against all instincts in a puzzle game.

Which is why Guayota feels like a game that feels like it tries to do way too much. Had it kept things simple – say, with lots of straightforward puzzles to solve with an overarching story that’s easy to follow – it probably would’ve been great. Instead we have needlessly hard puzzles accompanied by an overly complicated plot. Saying, “less is more” can come off as trite, but in this case it’s totally true.

Dear Villagers provided us with a Guayota PC code for review purposes.