I hate when a fantastic premise is wasted on a gameplay loop that just makes me stop being interested in a game after a while. I love when a game tackles a brand new kind of mythology I had never heard of before, or when it tackles a story regarding a less “mainstream” ancient civilization. Guayota, developed by the Spanish studio Team Delusion, is such an example. It’s a game set in the Canary Islands, about the people who lived in the islands before the arrival of the Spaniards, and it’s chock-full of mysticism and mythology. And sadly, it was wasted on an uninteresting gameplay loop.

You’ll be here a lot.

The first impression left an immensely positive mark on me. The game starts out promising a story full of adventure and mysticism. You’re told to explore a mysterious island in the Canary archipelago. The game even starts off with a shipwreck, and some really good voice acting (if there’s anything that works in here, it’s the voice acting). After waking up from said shipwreck, and exploring the surrounding beaches, I found a little passage to a brand new area. I legit thought I was going to play something akin to Link’s Awakening, given the initial setting and the top-down perspective.

But nope… I was just transported to a snowy mountain, with a temple located at the end of a corridor-esque area. Quite anticlimatic, as if a chunk of the game had been cut during development, but sure, there’s a temple nearby, so I thought about how interesting the puzzles and its interior could be. And sure, at first, these puzzles were quite interesting. The interior of the temple is completely pitch black, but considering puzzles were all about activating mechanisms with light stones, the contrast was quite neat, even if the reduced field of vision hindered the gameplay in the process.

Guayota does look pretty at times. Sadly, it focuses too much of its time on pitch-black temples, and not those pretty and epic locales.

The problem with that premise was that these puzzles just never stopped coming. One light-related puzzle after the other, with the occasional trap you won’t be able to properly see due to the reduced field of vision. Even if there was a bit of exposition, teaching me more about the origins and details of the Guanche (the pre-Spanish people living in the Canary Islands) people, at the end of each room, Guayota started to slowly wear me out. It was puzzle after puzzle after puzzle after exposition section. And things just started getting worse with each new room, as traps became even harder to notice, leading to my death in countless occasions.

In Guayota, death doesn’t mean a game over. You are just transported to an “alternate version” of the same room, with a different puzzle to solve. There is no way for you to get hurt in these sections, but they are a lot trickier, often revolving around special walls which become solid after passing through them. The problem with these sections is that, as they felt more complicated to solve, and because I was thrown at them after dying, I started feeling even less motivated to complete that puzzle. I felt like I was being punished for my own incompetence.

If you reach a puzzle like this, it means you died to a bunch of traps. Don’t worry, it will be more normal than you would imagine.

This is when Guayota started to lose me even more. I wanted to really like the game, as the premise is great. The plot was indeed interesting, and some puzzle sections led to some rewarding “a-ha” moments, in which I felt like a genius after figuring out how to solve them. Sadly, the sheer amount of boring puzzle sections, as well as the poor pacing, made me stop wanting to care about what would happen next. If the game were a bit shorter, and more focused on what it really wanted to be, I feel it would have been a lot more enjoyable. As such, I can only truly suggest picking it up if you want to enjoy a gauntlet of puzzles, without ever wanting to care about why you’re doing that, and what are these puzzles leading you towards.

Guayota is available now on PC and Switch.

Reviewed on Switch.

A copy of Guayota was provided by the publisher.