Krabat: The Secret of the Sorbian King might just be the most obscure game I have ever played and remember that I have played this, this and (of course) this.
But when I say this game is obscure I don't only mean that it isn't popular, but also its content.
This is the first Sorbian game, it is entirely voice acted in said language tells a story about/is based around Krabat, an old Sorbian tale, which I was vaguely familiar with (more so with Otfried Preußlers adaptation)).
This is a point & click game inspired by the likes of Monkey Island and other classic point & clicks, but before I get into talking the gameplay I would like to mention the overall presentation of the game, which really hit a soft spot of mine.
Visually this really looks like german early to mid 2000s like Little Amadeus, which I personally grew up with and the soundtrack is surprisingly good. I have uploaded a short clip to YouTube to show this, because it is really hard to find anything about this game.
So as I said this is a point & click puzzle game and this could be considered my first foray into said genre and from what I have learned this genre doesn't mesh well with obscurity. There were multiple puzzles which I found to be too hard to complete, but not in the way of me missing something obvious in hindsight, but rather something being obscured by something in front of it, or including an unintuitive to retrieve item.
I know I didn't do the best job describing these scenarios, but I'm going to give a few examples to make my problem more understandable.
Now these might be a bit spoiler-ish (which I will also mention when I get there), so if that is a problem you can skip to the next paragraph, but I'm not the only one who had problems with these parts of the game. So my first and least problematic example of this is a part where you need to de-rust something. Problem is that at this point you have probably already interacted with each thing near you, nothing of which could help you with rust. The solution to this is that there is some sort of lubrication you can find behind a lot of letters, which visually blends in with the background. I came to the solution by asking the nice devs at Rapaki on Twitter. Now the problem here wound up being more about not knowing what to search for, than the blending in with the background thing, because I could figure out were this lubrication was through context clues. Now the second example is way more offensive in my eyes and it is a big part of the end of the game and this is where I might get a bit into the spoiler territory. So the last part begins with you having to bring back two bulls to a farmer. One of them involves a really nice puzzle, but the other one is just way to hard to solve. I had to work with these posts in a German only forum, to solve it. I won't spoil the whole solution here, but one part of it was literally finding a needle in a hay stack, which only spawns there after a certain trigger and another part of it is stealing a crown from a group of snakes, which was way harder to execute than it should've been. I have uploaded a clip of the latter to YouTube, but I did watch a stream in the background, because of it just taking way to long to do and me eventually growing bored of skipping through the same dialogue over and over again, but if you still want to watch it here it is.
Now overall Krabat: The Secret of the Sorbian King is still a pretty solid game, with good puzzles (for the most part), nice visuals and a good soundtrack and for the low asking price of around 5€ and the first chapter being completely free I can only suggest you to give it a shot. Now this being the game that it is, it's of course not that easy to get a hold of, but it is available to download on Rapaki's website.
But when I say this game is obscure I don't only mean that it isn't popular, but also its content.
This is the first Sorbian game, it is entirely voice acted in said language tells a story about/is based around Krabat, an old Sorbian tale, which I was vaguely familiar with (more so with Otfried Preußlers adaptation)).
This is a point & click game inspired by the likes of Monkey Island and other classic point & clicks, but before I get into talking the gameplay I would like to mention the overall presentation of the game, which really hit a soft spot of mine.
Visually this really looks like german early to mid 2000s like Little Amadeus, which I personally grew up with and the soundtrack is surprisingly good. I have uploaded a short clip to YouTube to show this, because it is really hard to find anything about this game.
So as I said this is a point & click puzzle game and this could be considered my first foray into said genre and from what I have learned this genre doesn't mesh well with obscurity. There were multiple puzzles which I found to be too hard to complete, but not in the way of me missing something obvious in hindsight, but rather something being obscured by something in front of it, or including an unintuitive to retrieve item.
I know I didn't do the best job describing these scenarios, but I'm going to give a few examples to make my problem more understandable.
Now these might be a bit spoiler-ish (which I will also mention when I get there), so if that is a problem you can skip to the next paragraph, but I'm not the only one who had problems with these parts of the game. So my first and least problematic example of this is a part where you need to de-rust something. Problem is that at this point you have probably already interacted with each thing near you, nothing of which could help you with rust. The solution to this is that there is some sort of lubrication you can find behind a lot of letters, which visually blends in with the background. I came to the solution by asking the nice devs at Rapaki on Twitter. Now the problem here wound up being more about not knowing what to search for, than the blending in with the background thing, because I could figure out were this lubrication was through context clues. Now the second example is way more offensive in my eyes and it is a big part of the end of the game and this is where I might get a bit into the spoiler territory. So the last part begins with you having to bring back two bulls to a farmer. One of them involves a really nice puzzle, but the other one is just way to hard to solve. I had to work with these posts in a German only forum, to solve it. I won't spoil the whole solution here, but one part of it was literally finding a needle in a hay stack, which only spawns there after a certain trigger and another part of it is stealing a crown from a group of snakes, which was way harder to execute than it should've been. I have uploaded a clip of the latter to YouTube, but I did watch a stream in the background, because of it just taking way to long to do and me eventually growing bored of skipping through the same dialogue over and over again, but if you still want to watch it here it is.
Now overall Krabat: The Secret of the Sorbian King is still a pretty solid game, with good puzzles (for the most part), nice visuals and a good soundtrack and for the low asking price of around 5€ and the first chapter being completely free I can only suggest you to give it a shot. Now this being the game that it is, it's of course not that easy to get a hold of, but it is available to download on Rapaki's website.