Korine

Korine is a puzzle adventure game like Zelda, but with a focus on the state of mind of your hero. You explore, solve puzzles and fight your way through dungeons and ancient ruins built by aliens to activate a long-forgotten mechanism to save the world. Unusually your character has a pot of tea on their head, that's a useful weapon but also indicative of a focus on the mental state of your character.

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The puzzle solving is unusual as they become incrementally harder. One harder than the other. This involves pressing buttons, moving blocks, triggering tiles and pulling levers. Along with this there are rooms that lock you in with hostile guardians of the ruins. You use your staff and the burning hot projectiles of the Tea Drinker's Hat to defeat them.

When you take a hit you take damage and have a cool down until you are well again. This draws on the characters mental health and anxiety attacks, to both depict how they are feeling and how those feelings affect their ability to solve puzzles. The challenge is to keep anxiety in check before you're overcome with despair and become unable to move.

The result is an exuberant action adventure that requires you use your head in terms of mental health as well as solving puzzles

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Our examiner, Andy Robertson, first checked Korine 2 years ago. It was re-examined by Jo Robertson and updated 18 months ago.