Reka: Incredible Chicken-Legged Cottage, Undercooked Adventure
I’ve had my eye on Reka for a while now. Witch powers and a walking chicken-legged house is all that it took to pique my interest. It’s nice to see a game where not only can you play as a witch, but you can choose your own path: whether to be wicked or good is entirely up to you and your actions.
Reka is a third-person adventure game in which you control the titular character as she seeks out the Baba Yaga to learn the ways of being a witch. There’s no combat; instead, most of the gameplay consists of completing objectives which usually revolve around gathering items, helping out (or hindering) villagers, and completing trials for your witch mentor, the Baba Yaga.
Based in an alt, dream-like Slavic world, it is full of authentic Slavic folklore. There’s also a building element, but just calling it that is severely underselling it. In fact, I’d say that building your house on giant freaking chicken legs is a main selling point in Reka.
When it comes to mobile bases, I have to say that Reka has one of the best. I used to think the Cyclops in Subnautica was my favorite in-game vehicle/base, but Reka’s walking chicken house is not only fantastically delightful in concept, but it’s a pretty damn fun design project.
Reka is about building an awesome house and outfitting it with all the cool stuff you discover in the world as much as it is about going out and doing witchy things. In fact, I probably spent more time building and customizing my house–and then strutting around to admire my work–than I did any other activity. There’s something intoxicating about building a house on a freakin’ kaiju. Hell, Dark Souls’ Lost Izalith would have been fixed if they just let me build on one of those demon butts. But I digress.
Reka’s building isn’t perfect, but it’s certainly not the worst I’ve encountered in a video game. Camera angles can get a little claustrophobic when you’re trying to place clutter in tight corners, and piece-snapping occasionally fights you when you’re constructing multi-story, crooked towers, but the sheer freedom to build an asymmetrical gothic monstrosity makes up for the quirks. Part of the challenge is actually acquiring new structural styles–like birch, spruce, or clay–and decorative items to put in, on, and around your walking house.
This is accomplished by interacting with the world. Each time you’re done with one area, you can feed your giant bird mount and take your entire house into a new region–which will then generate a whole new set of people, buildings, items to potentially discover, tasks to accomplish, etc.
While you’re out looking for clothing and cool stuff for your house, you can also harvest ingredients for food, potions, and furniture/decor/house expansions. While a normal person would pick ingredients with their bare hands like a dummy, you can command a murder of crows to flock out and gather your ingredients for you.
Once you earn the blessing of the forest spirit Leshy, your crows will even knock down entire trees for timber–so long as you replant enchanted larch cones to keep the woods happy. As you progress, your witchy toolkit expands to include pine branches for smoke-cleansing haunted houses or calming beehives, indoor planters for growing herbs on the go, and a clay oven for baking everything from bread to cabbage soup. You can even scoop up stray black cats, foxes, and goats in the wild and bring them aboard to live in your chaotic bird-mansion.
Besides housebuilding, there’s an entire story and sidequests you can occupy yourself with like fulfilling local requests and completing witch trials for the Baba Yaga to advance the story. Each new map means a whole new set of points of interest and villagers you can help out–or terrorize. You might heal a family’s sick cattle and bake meals for the starving on one stop, or ruin someone’s harvest, steal their livestock, and scare the hell out of superstitious locals on the next.
Beyond the villagers, you’ll commune with Slavic deities like the life goddess Siva and don the ritual Dziady mask to cross the veil and judge restless ghosts in the swamps and spruce forests. Unfortunately, once the initial folkloric charm wears off, the actual quest design starts showing its seams. Most of your errands boil down to straightforward fetch quests, and after a few procedural maps, the world begins to feel less like a living, reactive RPG and more like a scenic resource dispenser to fund your next home renovation.
Overall, Reka is an okay game. While I enjoyed the base-building, everything else in Reka feels like it took a backseat to that. Between the repetitive village errands, a procedural loop that wears thin faster than it should, and lingering technical oddity that still crops up when loading dense maps or navigating terrain, the adventure outside your walls feels undercooked.
While I certainly found building the best aspect of the game, the full package still doesn’t feel quite ready for 1.0. I know there’s a point where you just have to push it out, but I don’t feel like Reka has quite made it to be the best game it could be. Perhaps through further support it’ll eventually get the polish and mechanical depth its premise deserves, but it’s more likely than not the version we have now is as deep as the cauldron gets.
If you just want a cozy, atmospheric architectural sandbox where you can build a crooked dream cottage on the back of a giant chicken, Reka will scratch that itch–just don’t expect the game around your walking house to be nearly as magical as the house itself.
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