Riko
A challenging Stephen's Sausage Roll inspired sokoban like game. Help Riko and her laser gun through 54 unique puzzles across six worlds.
Make it to the gold ring at the end of the level. Features a predictable enemy you can use to your advantage, and puzzle elements that work together in harmony.
A love letter to Stephen's Sausage Roll, DROD, and PuzzleScript games. Can you touch the stars?
Instructions
- Arrows or WASD - movement.
- Space - select/shoot
- Z - Undo
- R - Restart
- ESC - Back to Map
Game should save locally to your browser, with levels remaining completed between play sessions. (Use the same browser/computer)
Game isn't loading: you may need to allow third party cookies/storage. This is due to the game using localstorage to save your progress. Default settings of chrome and firefox should allow it to work. Incognito can also cause this issue.
Fix for Chrome: https://stackoverflow.com/a/44069936
Need a hint? This website has a comment section with lots of great hints and some full solutions:
https://www.bontegames.com/2020/08/riko-browser.html
Team
Andrew Jakubowicz (Spyr) - Code, Art, Design
Nic Alabaster - Designer
Matthew Lahkhan - Music
Comments
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Ok I've returned to this game after 2 years after beating what are considered to be the hardest puzzle games in the market and "around the corner" is STILL trumping me. I've seen simple puzzles with seemingly impossible setups countless times, but god damnit this is getting ridiculous. Good game btw
"Around the corner" is playing with a bit of a cheeky mechanic that was nearly cut (and maybe should have been). Thank you for the comment :D
Had to use a small hint, and I'm a little mixed. On the one hand, the mechanic used is very interesting, and not touched upon in SSR. But on the other hand, the block not falling is softly breaking what felt like a very fundamental rule. Maybe the puzzle, using one-turn movements, could have used an enemy as a timer with you setting the blocks up beforehand?
Agree - your suggestion using the enemy would have been much better! This is fixed in the game I am currently working on as it is possible for the player to accomplish a true diagonal move within a turn.
"the game I am currently working"
Oh, exciting! I'm guessing it also a puzzler that uses forklift controls, and I'm super interested in any upcoming puzzle games. Will keep tuned.
I love puzzle games that made me really think of solutions and this is one of them. I cleared the first world so far, really satisfying. Now in the second world, I am stuck on "Shepherd" level. Clever puzzles.
Adorable. I love this! Puzzles are so so good and I love the character design (I assume it to be an axolotl for my own love for them lol) that matches the theme overall.
This game is amazing! Super challenging puzzles with interesting mechanics. I've only beaten 18 levels so far and already think it's better than many paid games in terms of puzzle design. I like how you took Stephen's Sausage Roll's trademark control scheme and added your own twist to it. Would love to see it get a graphical remaster and then get sold on Steam, perhaps with some added levels. Not to say that the current graphics are bad, as it looks pretty good for what I assume is a PuzzleScript game, just that it would look a bit too basic for a commercial game.
Thank you and appreciate the comment! A new game is currently in early progress which aims to have more polish and be slightly larger in scope (with some remastered puzzles and many new ones!)
Have fun!
Wow, that's great news! Really looking forward to it!
lovely game, i had some trouble figuring it out though as the difficulty ramps up quite fast so i decided i'd make a walkthrough for it : https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLFXHNNJm6_-SM4mMYdWbnlIbaMfw8X3rK
Really love the "About the Monster" video. Also nice!
this might be a good puzzle game, but controls are not intuitive and it stopped me(just think about it, good puzzle game is you think on start of a puzzle, but this puzzle make me think for every step)
sorry for bad english
I tried and quit and came back to "four rooms" again and again over the course of weeks. I kept coming back and today I finally got a solution that I believed would work: mirrors lined up to reflect the laser to the final switch with no doors in the way. I had it. PIC
And then I find out the laser can't cross itself. A situation I had never come across.
This is just pure evil.
I checked the hints and it says I need all the mirrors free to move and my broken solution has 2 irretrievable so I'm back to square one.
I won't let this level defeat me.
Picture of me testing that level: https://imgur.com/gallery/ZESV9
I don't think I'll finish all the monster levels. I'm good with puzzles where I can keep track of all the different permutations and it's very hard for me If every move I make almost irreversibly changes the elements of the level. The solution is too exact and one wrong step can mess you up.
That's not a criticism of puzzle design. My brain just doesn't work that way. I could eventually come to the solution, but it would require too much trial and error, and that's just no fun.
Thanks for the game!
Got it! I couldn't figure out how to get the laser past itself and the solution is so simple but kind of novel at the end. This game has fried my brain.
i suck at this game but this game has a good game soundtrack
Great game but i think i acidentally found a cheese:
in the puzzles that you have to make the monsters chase you onto a button, you can just push the monster onto the square until you're past the square.
Wowee, this is honestly one of the best puzzle game I've ever played. The satisfying animations, the overall polish, the brutal and mindbending difficulty of the puzzles that also never seem truly impossible. So good. I just finished playing through DROD and that game made me really appreciate the minimalism of Riko's design (I still enjoyed DROD quite a bit). I would love to see more games like this, especially if they also include a catgirl with an egregiously impractical laser gun.
Thank you!
any tips for Backed Up? it's a little tricky...nvm I got it. fun game!
Awesome! Also linked a site (in Riko description) with a large discussion with hints for many levels.
Thank you!
good game, but bad difficulty curve
Appreciate the feedback. Agree!
played this game a while back and never completed it, since my progress kept deleting. I'm gonna try getting back to where I was as I enjoyed it so much
Thanks for the comment! That's good feedback. In the future (probably next game) will add some way to save a file out of the browser so you have more control of your save.
Wow this playlist is amazing! https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLqnMDAwv_U-y9wKD9fm8lBuYuNsWihDTa
I've been really enjoying watching your thought process! Thank you for sharing!
Awesome.
I was REALLY enjoying this then I did a force restart of my laptop and now the game won't load when I hit run game.. I just get a pretty night sky.. any idea wassup? (Mac, Firefox)
My initial thought is it is due to the save system and requiring you to "allow third party cookies/storage".
If you right click on the page somewhere and press "Inspect" a developer console should appear. Select "Console" tab.
When the game fails to load is there a red error that appears. That should help narrow issue.
I found this fix for Chrome, and Firefox should have something similar.
Otherwise you can play the game on my domain where this issue shouldn't occur: https://riko-game.netlify.app/
Hey
Thanks for the reply. I have come to the same conclusion as I'm having issues with other sites - Facebook & Netflix - yet I've followed the Mozilla help advice to enable cookies and either can't find items where they say they should be (the 'Allow cookies, etc' button in 'Cookies & Site Data' in 'Security & Privacy', or the item doesn't exist (I have 'Manage Exceptions' rather than 'Manage Permissions').. I'm set to 'Standard' in any case which should allow everything - the odd thing is I can't even log in to Firefox because it says 'Cookies and local storage are required'... I'm baffled.
Where you able to resolve the issue? Very interested if there was something you were able to do to work around it or resolve it.
Similarly, did the direct link work at all?
Thank you!
Andrew
Hey Andrew Yes, by giving up on Firefox, uninstalling it and making Chrome my default browser - now everything works fine again. Maybe I'll try to reinstall at some point to see if issue is resolved but I hit a wall and didn't want to waste any more time on it.
I didn't try the direct link but thanks anyway.
Still LOVING this game though I've got to 'Winding'and it's getting tricky now - I can see where I need to get everything to but the order of ops is baffling me atm.. Cheers
May I use the sprites in my game?
i love it, but it's very hard lol
Where you in the level progression?
I've also linked to a forum where many hints and spoilers have been discussed in the description for the game! Thank you for the comment! ^.^
i think i've completed the first 3 levels
Awesome! 51 to go ;)
I finally beat the last sequence of levels :-)
Crossing Over had me stumped for a while, because I was convinced that Nic would eventually build a puzzle around the obscure interaction of pushing monsters with your back. Alas, it wasn't to be.
Congratulations!!! That was an unintended bug that came out of the pushing rules. I don't know of any case where back pushes are useful. I wonder :P
There was a level that got cut that leaned heavily on the monster not jumping into your beam which felt a bit obscure as well.
https://imgur.com/a/eCCvJe7
I think I can see the path through that level, but it looks fiendish and fiddly: probably a good one to have cut!
The only instance in which back pushing would be viable is if it took you all the way to the exit ring, over some combination of switches that otherwise couldn't be simultaneously triggered. But I'm not sure what the process is for actually getting yourself into a back-pushing configuration, as it's one of those things that I discovered accidentally during the long nights of the soul trying to figure out some of the more baroque monster-management levels :-)
Could we get the ability to reset our progress overall so we can go back and play again (without needing to keep track of where we left off)?
That is a great idea to add in a patch upgrade. In the meantime there is a manual way.
Warning - clearing all LocalStorage will clear other game save states. These instructions show how to clear only the "playerState" variable Riko uses to store a save.
1. Ctrl+Shift+I to open developer console. Or right click on the page and select inspect.
2. Select Application tab on Chrome, or Storage on Firefox.
3. Click the "Run Game" button to load Riko.
4. Under "Local Storage" there should be a https://v6p9d9t4.ssl.hwcdn.net (Where itch.io stores all browser saves). There will be other itch.io game saves here so don't clear it all. Select it.
5. Find the Key "playerState". It might have something like ["Overworld_pre"] in it. Right click the key "playerState" and delete it.
6. Refresh page. State should be gone.
Excellent!
Hello,
Nice game, great effort! It's good to see people picking up and exploring the space games like SSR brought to us.
If I'm allowed to nitpick on a couple of things it'd be the chunky pixel art (more detail would have helped a lot in reading the levels and their elements) and the grouping of the levels (having, for example, a block of 9 levels in which aliens are present or mirrors are present would have made the game design look more coherent).
In any case: very nice, thanks for this!
P.S. We got Jonathan Blow to try the game out on stream and we had a small discussion about it, so check it out: https://www.twitch.tv/videos/710688626?t=2h46m1s if you're interested.
Oh my goodness. Really appreciate the comment and the twitch stream link. (Thank you for recommending it to Jonathan!) We enjoyed watching and learning a lot from it.
Totally get the pixel art complaint. It was decision made to keep the game possible to make (due to my non existent art skills).
It has been a real honor to see people play the game and see how we could have improved it to have more consistent level groupings rather than "some art & difficulty".
Really helpful discussions and such useful criticisms. Will be keeping it in mind for our next game ^.^
Hello Andrew. This is a great game! I'm so impressed. I'm a fan of yours for you YouTube rustlang content, I'm curious if you code this game with Rust! Looking forward to see another rust addition on your channel :).
Thank you so much! I initially started with the idea of the logic part of this game in Rust but I got sidetracked and ended up doing it all in JS/Typescript. I have been thinking of making a video showing sort of the flow of developing this game. From building the game logic, level editor, art, sound and world map shader. Although not Rust, the ideas are transferable.
The undo system uses a cool library immer.js which gave undoing for free after a bit of setup.
The big con of javascript is that sometimes a garbage collection pause makes a keyboard input feel unresponsive.
I am also interested in writing Rust plugins for game dev tools like Unity. However need to advance my Unity skills a little more :P
Speaking of undo, one neat feature of Puzzlescript is that the undo stack includes level restarts. I don't know if it's possible in your particular implementation, but it's more useful than you'd think, as the restart can have a tendency to clarify where your previous attempt went wrong when you're getting close to a solution.
I did not include restarting in the undo stack although that would have been really useful (an oversight). I used the PuzzleScript documentation as a reference for the implementation of game logic. The Riko engine allows chain reactions of rules to happen like in PuzzleScript, but we cut any of the chain reaction elements out of the final game as it didn't add anything to the puzzles.
i.e. We had an explosive that would damage tiles on either side that you could arrange. I liked it cause it was cool, and could wreck your large blocks, but it didn't add anything.
Thanks for letting me know about the undo restart. Come to think of it, Stephen's Sausage Roll also keeps restart in undo stack!
I just want to say, I've played plenty of puzzle games, like The Talos Principle, Snakebird, The Adventures of Lolo trilogy, Braid, The Witness, etc, and this is pretty close to those games in terms of design, challenge and ideas. I've been playing on and off for the last 4 days and I just beat all the levels, it's inmensely satisfying. If I were to improve anything, it would be adding more tunes, because listening to the same theme on a level you've been stuck on for the last hour can be slightly maddening lol. Seriously, this is really, really good and it's free to boot. I'm looking forward to your future projects.
Thanks so much for playing and the feedback! Four days is super impressive for completing all the levels!!! :D
Gonna check out The Adventures of Lolo trilogy!
Do you have a gentle hint for 'Around a Corner'? The two loose blocks have caused me to wonder if I've missed a mechanic!edit: a-ha! Sometimes asking a question leads you towards an answer :-)
The puzzles so far have been great, though I do wonder whether it might be worth allowing progression to the next floor after beating a 7-8 of the current floor's levels, so that progress can continue even when you run into a stubborn level? Perhaps you could gate the final set of levels around 100% completion?
Thank you for playing! Great job getting around that corner ^.^
Hear you and agree that there could definitely be a better way to prevent getting blocked by a level.
I could really use that hint tho. Great game BTW.
Spoilers ahead (not aware of a spoiler tag). Could you push it in a sort of diagonal? Or could you get it all the way in one move?
Good luck!
Got it, thx.
The creativity is mind-boggling! The puzzles are nail-biting! Fantastic!!
Fantastic stimulating puzzle game. Nice relaxing music for thinking. Every puzzle needs to be pondered, especially in the higher levels. Gratz.
Fun, challenging and adorable. I love everything about this.