In Bokida you play as a “messenger” trying to bring forth the reunion of two planets by solving puzzles and activating black monoliths. Your main interaction with the world is creating minecraft-like cubes and cutting them. This allows you to create scaffolding to go wherever you like and also solve some laser-based puzzles by chiselling them to reflect light. Each monolith you activate brings the black sun closer and closer, hopping for a long awaited unification.

The world of Bokida is the epitome of minimal. Pure white with a few black objects sprinkled throughout, with the black planet watching over you from the sky. In this huge landscape there are mountains, trees, broken edifices and temples, rivers, caves and even a Giant's Causeway. The scenery is masterfully put together and is beautiful to look at, your colourful blocks being almost the only thing breaking with the monotony of whiteness.

As you progress and bring the suns closer together you start to get more abilities. Very early you get the power of being pulled towards cubes and later you get a shotgun-like way of destroying them. It's interesting that you don't actually need any of this abilities and the game can be completed with just the ones you start with. The world is intricately big and I have the feeling that I missed a lot, though, so maybe there are some hidden puzzles that make use of this advanced abilities.

One reunion that was not welcomed is the joining of a stunning and artistic experience with one of the most annoying game mechanics: collectibles. Throughout the beautiful world there are black “echoes” that you can collect and which “will be useful in the reunion”. In order to finish the game, you must find at least 30 of them. Since there are enough of them lying around in the main path, there's no need to go out of your way to get them. But they are there and the game hints at a different ending if you collect more. And I hate it. I hate that immerse in this interesting and minimal experience I get this horrible gamey mechanic shoved down my throat.

See, the problem is that the minimalist setting is a double-edge sword. While Bokida's world is beautiful to look at, it's boring to explore basically because there is nothing interesting. The bare white soil, bare white caves, bare white mountains are lovely to watch from a distance, but there's nothing that invites the player to go there. So I found myself wheezing through locations without much interest in learning their secrets and definitely with no intention of combing through them searching for unappealing black spheres just to fill up a counter.

Detailed investigation is also not encouraged by movement mechanics, which are perfectly designed to get the player from here to there as fast as possible. You can jump and glide and also propel forward. You can put a cube somewhere very high and effectively “fly” towards it; this allows the player to reach anywhere they want with ease without the need of slowly constructing scaffolding out of cubes. Traversing this place is a very satisfying experience.

In the end, I felt that this small 3 hour game had the potential of being more. With such a huge but empty world and so many unused mechanics, I wouldn't have mind if it were much longer and elaborate. While beautiful and compelling, it still felt like a slightly more developed version of a indie game published in itch for free.