Thank you NIS America for sending us a review code!

Giraffe and Annika begins with the young girl, Annika, waking up on Spica island with no memories. She is quickly introduced to a young boy named Giraffe who knows her name and is familiar with the island and its secrets. To help regain her memories, Giraffe suggests that Annika retrieves three star fragments that are located in different dungeons.

Naturally, each of the fragments is protected by a boss who needs to be defeated in a rhythm style mini-game. The majority of this title plays like an adventure game. With the acquisition of each star fragment Annika will learn a new ability that will be needed to retrieve the others.

In the beginning, Annika can barely jump, swim, or run. These abilities are acquired when Annika retrieves the three star fragments. Another limiter in this game is keys. Without the properly colored key, Annika won’t be able to open gates to access new areas on the island. The same keys work on color-coded doors that often have useful items or meowsterpieces behind them.

There are thirty meowsterpieces to collect and you’ll need to find close to half of them to complete the game. There’s an art collecting ghost on the island that will hand out prizes for contributing to his collection. The first prize is a sailor outfit you can dress Annika in. The second prize is a train ticket that is necessary to access the final area in this game.

Though there are a couple of nice ghosts on the island, most of them attack Annika on the spot. Unfortunately, Annika does not have the means to fight back unless she’s in a boss/rhythm battle. During the boss battles Annika can move to the left, center, and right positons. On the left and right hand side are circles that have to have the A button pressed when the Rhythmo Balls are aligned with it. The green balls only need one press while the blue ones require holding the button down until they’re gone. The enemies will also throw in projectile attacks that will need to be dodged. Some of their attacks will immobilize you for a few seconds causing you to miss some Rhythmo Balls and deplete your health bar.

The island has a few inhabitants on it that will seek Annika’s assistance. In return they’ll offer some helpful advice and items to help Annika on her journey. One of the quests involves Annika playing matchmaker for a shy girl named Mary who likes a boy whose name is a mystery to her. Many of the characters on the island have greater significance to Annika as the story progresses.

Giraffe and Annika’s story sequences are told through comic book-style panels. The dialogue is not voice acted, and half of the text is various sounds effects like “Sqreeeee!”, “Boom!”, “Pow!”, etc. The game is broken down into daytime and nighttime sequences. The background music changes during the morning, afternoon, and evening. The dungeons are only open during the day or evening. If you’ve arrived at the wrong time, you can sleep in nearby beds to advance the time. Some quests have to be triggered at a specific time and in order to know that, you’ll have to find and equip the stopwatch.

The character design, 2D artwork, and animations look cute. However, when running this game docked and using a big screen, the 3D models don’t look that good. With that said, the game ran fine on the Switch. It doesn’t look bad on the small screen/undocked.

Morally, there are some concerns. Violence is minimal as Annika takes damage from ghosts that hurl water, flames, and tornados at her. She must also dodge huge rolling boulders and lava as they will immediately kill Annika if she makes contact with them. There are several goddess statues on the island that need to have harvest (apples, carrots, pumpkins) offerings made to them. Lastly, one of the female characters wears a bikini-style outfit that shows off her midriff.

Giraffe and Annika is a charming title. I found the difficulty of it “just right” with a hard enough difficulty to challenge without inducing rage quit. The boss battles have three difficulty modes so you can adjust that aspect of the game. There is an achievement available for completing this game in 4.5 hours, but my playthrough was 8.5. I have seen this game as low as $14.99 on Steam; I’m not sure why the Switch version has a much higher price tag of $30. It’s worth checking out if you can find it on sale.