Ooooohoohoohoohoo, that was a fun one... The Count Lucanor is a 2D, pixel art horror puzzle game, put together by the charmingly dramatic development team over at Baroque Decay. I'd read some positive things about it before giving it a try, but I'll be honest; hearing people describe it as heavily inspired by Silent Hill did not give me much hope. More often than not, I've found that games that fall into that category tend to emphasize taboo gore and poor visibility while giving little thought to the actual narrative. Not so here. The Count Lucanor gave me one of the most engrossing video game stories I've come across in years, and without resorting to a single Pyramid Head.

The game starts off putting you in control of Hans, a ten year old peasant boy who, sick of his life of poverty, decides to run away from home and see the world, leaving behind a mother clearly terrified for his safety. Along the way he meets colorful characters - some friendly, some sinister - and eventually he comes across the castle of the titular Count Lucanor. The smiling blue kobold he meets there strikes a deal with him: if Hans can pass the Count's trial by daybreak, he'll be adopted and made the new Count Lucanor. And so starts the game proper.

Like any good survival horror game, TCL emphasizes the importance of stealth and caution above all else, as Hans has no ability to attack his enemies. This only matters a small portion of the time, however, as most of the game is made up of solving block puzzles, avoiding traps, deciphering riddles, and applying adventure game logic to the inventory of random crap you accumulate along the way. Every now and then though, you'll come across creatures intent on murdering our protagonist, and if you can't simply hide out of sight until they leave, running for your life is your only recourse. The game strikes a pretty commendable balance between difficulty and frustration - while you'll almost certainly die a few times along the way, you should never hit a point where you're absolutely stuck, and more often than not making further progress is a matter of reconsidering the information available and what your options are, rather than just trying to git gud.

The game's most appealing element, however, is the actual plot. The setting is a wonderfully realized poverty-stricken medieval fiefdom, straight out of something the Brothers Grimm would've slapped together. Little Hans is presented early and often with painful choices on how to use his limited resources, and almost every character you come across is more complex and troubled than first appearances suggest. The artwork is rather simple, but the character design and animation (especially during the Ghibli-esque anime cutscenes) are excellent, conveying just the right dash of unearthly bad-ness to give the player pause. Complete with hidden dialogue, branching paths, and multiple endings, the game offered enough squirreled-away content to get me replaying it immediately after finishing just to see what parts of the story I missed the first time around.

The game has its flaws, of course. NPC AI is a touch wonky, with enemies occasionally ignoring you no matter how close you get, or wandering into walls and getting stuck there. Even more glaring, the translation to English is a little rough, but hardly to the point where it disrupts the experience. All told, The Count Lucanor is an excellent little game to spend an evening or two on, and very reasonably priced. If you enjoy dark fairy tales and intelligently designed puzzles, I eagerly endorse it.