The last few years has seen a wave of smaller, arty indie titles that focus on deep themes and emotional connections. Think titles like Neva or Spiritfarer.
Koira is a new title published and co-produced by Don’t Nod and Studio Tolima. It’s Studio Tolima’s debut title with a focus on music and sound design as you venture through a wintery forest to try and find your home. The game is entirely wordless, relying on expressive visuals and music to tell its story.
Puppy Love
In Koira you play as a forest spirit that shakes off the remnants of a forgotten statue and ventures out into the forest. Not far into your journey you’ll encounter a small puppy, strung up in a hunters trap. After freeing him, he’ll teach you how to sing special notes to cleanse a nearby statue of it’s red aura.
This is the main gameplay loop of Koira. You travel through the forest, playing with your new puppy friend, singing, building snowmen and feeding him apples when he gets hungry. In return he’ll chase off the shadows of the forest with his shining golden nose, dig new paths for you and help you with other statues on the way.
There’s a handful of puzzles to solve as you make it through the wintery woods to your cabin. You might need to gather up some small dancing mushrooms to get the notes for a statue or even rebuild the statue before you can sing to it and cleanse it. Or figure out how to help some wild boar evade the hunters skulking about. None of the puzzles are too complex, but are enough so you’re not just frolicking through the forest.
There are also some stealth sections – which are very adorably explained via hide and seek with your dog. They’re generally handled pretty well, with only one near the beginning giving me a little bit of trouble due to what I assume was a small bug in the AI loop, and knowing when to hide or run from the hunters in the woods makes for some very dramatic moments.
Sights and Sounds.
Koira is entirely wordless, relying on expressive visuals and music to tell its story. And it’s a beautiful story. I won’t spoil to much of it, you should really try it for yourself but it isn’t all throwing snowballs and dressing up your new friend with hats and flowers. As mentioned above there are hunters in the woods. They seem to be indiscriminately trapping any animals they can find and that includes your new dog.
The tonal shift in the visuals and the sound design when you are hiding from them, running from them or standing up to them is wonderful. At the start of the game Koira is full of pale pastels, with the occasional dark cloud your new friend can chase away. The music and sound scape is peaceful and cheery. Your puppy makes a delightful little sound if he trips and falls in the snow. When you call to him (in musical notes) he’ll call back in clear melodious sounds played on woodwind instruments with a slight tinkle of metallic percussion if you’re both being a little mischievous.
As you start to get closer to the human inhabited area of the woods though there are slight changes. You’ll see warning black warning signs and jagged fences cutting through the snowy backdrop. There’s bear traps that snap shut with a cacophonous clang and more discordant brass notes seep into the soundtrack when you start to see cages and barbed wire keeping the denizens of the forest from running freely. It’s expertly blended , and I would really recommend playing with headphones on for the full audio experience.
Final Thoughts
I said above that I won’t spoil the story of Koira. What I will say is that it did make me tear up more than once. The game’s themes: friendship and understanding between the forest spirit, their new dog and the animals in the forest; contrasted with the humans greed, need to overcome and essentially conquer nature is something that we see too often in the real world I fear. And just like in the real world, disregard for nature, trying to remove ourselves or put ourselves above it – as if we are ‘other’ to the world we inhabit can lead to dire consequences. In the short term this removal might work out best for us, but at the end of the day the world was here before us, it’ll be here after and maybe it would be best to try and leave things better than we found them.
Koira was reviewed on PC. Gamer Social Club would like to thank Don’t Nod and Studio Tolima for the code.
Koira releases on PS5 and PC on April 1st 2025.
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