Armikrog feels like a lot of the children s games that were foisted on me by non-gaming relatives in the 90s, and I probably would have enjoyed it more if I were 15 years younger. At that age I was so excited to be playing games at all that I could innocently interpret a string of trivial but illogical obstacles as mysterious rather than a sign of shoddy production. Delayed twice, Armikrog is still chock full of padding, which is remarkable considering it s just four hours long, closer to what an early publisher might pump out to fill a hole than a Kickstarted labour of love.

The opening cutscene (that is, the Claymation cutscene after the hand-drawn musical number that attempts to introduce the story) got my hopes up. Pencil Test Studios Claymation is rich and fluid, the fingerprints in the clay that studios like Aardman edit out giving earthy authenticity to the stop motion. Spaceman Tommynaut and his psychic dog Beak Beak crawl from their crashed spaceship only to be accosted by the local wildlife in a slapstick sequence worthy of any Saturday morning cartoon. Then they run inside a nearby tower and slam the door on a promising start.

Facial animation is the first thing I noticed was missing. When Beak Beak and Tommy chat, the sound spouts from a nonspecific location, but as there s precious little conversation to begin with, you stop seeing it quickly. That s odd for an adventure game. Usually they lean on dialogue to energise static scenes, but Tommy and Beak Beak proceed in silence, as if the introduction had interrupted a lovers tiff and they re waiting for the other to apologise. Instead, you hear the occasional thank you when Beak Beak weighs down a button or retches up an item he swallowed.

It s not just about flavour—muteness is a mechanical problem. Neither character will indicate when a problem requires their intervention. A button at waist height might need either Tommy or Beak Beak to press it, or it could need powering on elsewhere, but you can t know unless you try with both. Every time. This is part of a larger problem that Armikrog has with clarity and finesse. It uses the default Windows cursor for a start, incongruous in a world of clay, and offers not the slightest hint at which objects are interactive and which are not or which character must do the dirty work. Worse, some buttons become interactive only when they re good and ready for you, masquerading as static scenery until a later time. On others, the haste with which Armikrog must have been thrown together is betrayed by the tell-tale halo of a green screen.

Maybe I m grateful for the silence. Greetings, friend! I am Abrah-ant Lincoln chatters an ant in a top hat before clicking out a puzzle. That s all he says. There s also Thomas Jeffers-ant, complete with Declaration of Independ-ants (that s one of mine) and what might have been a Roosevelt, but he doesn t talk long enough to deliver an ant-based pun—the very height of humour on this baffling plane of existence. As to why there is a stream US presid-ants (hire me), Armikrog doesn t much care. It s the random comedic grasping of a child learning to structure a joke.

Armikrog operates internal logic divorced from any school of human thought. It s not about problem solving but completing the same set of isolated, artificial tasks three times over before the final showdown. It makes the first round of puzzles quite mystifying: push the orange monster to the right to open a secret door. Who cares why? Use the psychic dog to talk to the tentacle creature, who will deliver a cutscene entirely in a made-up language before spitting out a machine part. For reasons. Use a lever to enter a cable car, but make sure it s the right lever and not the one that just looks like the right lever because the model is bugged. Solve a sliding block puzzle for the third time, because that s what counts as a lock around here. Armikrog is beaten through learned behaviour, not deductive reasoning.

The chasm between Armikrog logic and real logic is embodied by the baby puzzle. Early on you find an abandoned infant, and to stop the blighter crying you need to complete a memory test, hooking toys to a mobile as an off-key jingle nibbles at your sanity. If the jingle completes a full rendition without anything falling, you receive a vital, story-progressing item. Otherwise, you have to rearrange the toys and sit through a tortuous encore. This vestigial excuse for a puzzle is wheeled out thrice to kill time.

Armikrog treats the chain of causality with contempt, beholden to nothing but its own sporadic attempts to challenge the player. It succeeds in getting in your way. Your first encounter with any given puzzle provides the solution to the lot, if only you weren t confronted with the arduous task of implementing it.

I was going to just let you know that claymation point-and-click adventure Armikrog is finally out, but then I saw RPS report a particularly nasty progress-halting bug. Now this is a warning: probably don't buy Armikrog yet.

You might be thinking, "I'm a PC gamer. Bugs don't bother me," but the list of problems is extensive: faulty triggers (thus why John Walker has had to start the game again), missing voices, objects generally not acting as they should, and much more.

People on the Steam forums are not happy, but the developers say that, other than a few "minor issues," they're "quite happy and proud of it". Hopefully Armikrog will get a patch, because it looks visually very impressive. Just probably hold off until the issues are fixed.

Boy, this is getting embarrassing. In June, I said that Armikrog, the Claymation-style adventure game from the creators of The Neverhood, would be out in August. Then in August, I said it would be out in September. Now it's September, and I'm here to tell you that, if all goes as planned, Armikrog will in fact be out in September—but a few weeks later in September than expected. It was supposed to be out today, but what we have instead is an email saying it's been pushed back again. 

"The Pencil Test team has been working around the clock (literally) to get Armikrog polished for release," it says. "Their goal is to give gamers a great game but unfortunately over these past few days they encountered a few new bugs that forced them to push back the release date. Given that this is a small indie team, they just need a little more time to get the game to a level that is release worthy and that fans will enjoy so the release has been pushed back to September 30th."

I emailed Pencil Test to ask how reliable this new date is likely to be and haven't yet received a reply, probably because it's akin to asking them if the game is going to be any good. What do I really expect them to say? Fortunately, while I can't vouch for the solidity of the new date, we can at least agree that it looks very promising.

Claymation point-and-click adventure Armikrog, from the creators of Earthworm Jim and The Neverhood, lands on PC in September. We're giving away 10 Steam keys to lucky readers. That could mean you!

To enter the giveaway, simply click through to the giveaway page and write in your name and email address. 10 random winners will be picked from the pool of entrants.

Enter the giveaway here

The giveaway for Armikrog runs until Friday, September 4th at 12 pm PDT.

The game releases on September 8th. For more on Armikrog, check out our hands-on preview from E3 2015.

"Armikrog arrives in August," we—well, I—told you in June. And I did so in good faith and with the best of intentions! I have recently been informed, however, that this is not actually going to happen. Instead, the game will be out on September 8.

"As we're approaching the finish line, we've come across some details in the game that we really want to address. Some of the issues are about tuning, while others are straight-up bugs fixes," developer Pencil Test Studios said in a statement. "Since we owe it to every one of you to give you the best possible game we can make, we've decided to push back the game's release date to September 8th."

It's not a huge delay, given that the game was originally slated for August 18, but one worth being aware of if you've been looking forward to it. And Armikrog sounds like it may be worth looking forward to: Our E3 hands-on with the claymation adventure, developed as a spiritual successor to The Neverhood, wasn't without bumps, but we did say that its clay-based world "confounds all expectations."

Examined on paper, I can easily understand how point-and-click adventure game Armikrog accrued nearly a million dollars during its 2013 crowdfunding campaign: claymation visuals that defy expectation, an offbeat world full of talking dogs and fuzzy monsters, classic puzzle-solving that harkens back to adventure gaming s golden age.

And then there s Armikrog s pedigree. Indie developer Pencil Test Studios core creative team consists of the same people who created Earthworm Jim and The Neverhood, the influential cult classic that pioneered Armikrog s visual style and whose hero bares an uncanny resemblance to this new game s protagonist, Tommynaut. That team in turn recruited some top voice talent—including Jon Heder (Napoleon Dynamite), Rob Paulsen (Pinky and the Brain), and Michael J. Nelson (Mystery Science Theater 3000)—to bring its quirky world to life.

According the the Magic Eight Ball of Expectation, all signs point to the game being excellent. After playing Armikrog on the E3 2015 showfloor last week, however, some concerns about the puzzle design brought me back down to earth. But let s start with the good: The opening cinematic is short and sweet, elegantly framing Tommynaut and his bizarre canine companion Beak Beak as explorers who ve crash landed on a hostile world. In fleeing from a silly-looking monster, they dive through a portal and a door slams shut behind them, leaving them no choice but to move forward through a series of rooms.

It s a fairly basic setup, sure, but at least it avoids tedious exposition. Plus, it fast tracks players to the game s true star: controlling characters in Armikrog s world of clay. Screenshots alone may have already sold you on the aesthetic, but seeing it in action confounds all expectations. The animations are just so incredibly smooth and seamless, I could hardly believe the world I was seeing was actually reacting to my inputs. I know this isn t the first game to utilize stop motion claymation, but I can t remember anything else that looked quite this good doing it.

Appropriately, the world itself somehow feels like a natural extension of the art style, embracing all the weird and wonderful quirks of the medium. Tommynaut, for example, stores items by simply shoving them into his squishy clay stomach, and one of the later rooms I encountered during my demo seemed to melt into shape as I entered it. From the character design to the (somewhat limited) dialogue, everything about Armikrog effuses this very particular offbeat quality.

Unique as the world may be, however, the gameplay still fell flat—at least in the limited portion I was able to play. I experienced several moments that made me think, Am I an idiot or was this actually not super well designed? Maybe I am an idiot, but either way, that thought s not a great sign. To give you an idea of what I mean: When I walked up to the Armikrog kiosk, the Indiecade rep manning the station was trying desperately to exit a tile puzzle that provided no instructions and that couldn t be abandoned once players clicked into it. She eventually had to quit out of the game entirely.

Once I started a fresh game, the first puzzle consisted of picking up a lever, attaching it to a door, walking through an empty room, pushing a block back the way I came, and finally retrieving the original lever by sending Beak Beak through a hole in the wall. The only challenge came from the fact that I didn t immediately notice the slot by the second door where I was meant to place the lever, which was more frustrating than challenging. It s probably safe to assume Armikrog s puzzles grow more sophisticated as the game progresses, but I didn't get to see evidence of that in the demo.

Admittedly, the E3 showfloor is far from an ideal setting for first impressions, and the team at Pencil Test Studios still has a few months left to polish (good thing, considering the opening cutscene still consists largely of black and white placeholder sketches). We'll see the complete picture when Armikrog is out on August 18.

Doug TenNapel's claymation-like adventure game Armikrog successfully crossed the Kickstarter Rubicon in June 2013, and while the estimated July 2014 delivery date came and went uneventfully, the studio announced today that the Neverhood-style adventure game will be out on August 18.

There's a new trailer, too, narrated by Rob Paulsen, the voice of Beak Beak, a pointy-nosed dog/alien creature who accompanies the game's hero, Tommynaut, on his journey—a journey that's cut short when their spaceship crash-lands on a strange, alien world. The game is being developed by Pencil Test Studios, an indie outfit founded in 2013 by TenNapel, Mike Dietz, and Ed Schofield, who previously worked together on Earthworm Jim and The Neverhood.

"The Pencil Test team have created a hand sculpted, stop motion game fans young and old will enjoy. Every hand-crafted detail of Armikrog is beautiful, funny, and rich," Steve Escalante, general manager of publisher Versus Evil, said. "It is a true compliment to what indie development teams can accomplish when they have a strong vision."

I wasn't sure what to make of the game at first—I missed out on The Neverhood—but based on this trailer, I'm now really looking forward to it. Find out more at Armikrog.com.