I have long loved playing games by Amanita Design with my kids, particularly “Machinarium.” They create such stellar worlds with interesting characters, without a single word of intelligible dialogue.

So it was like Christmas in January when I read on Twitter that Amanita had released a game called “Creaks” in 2020, and somehow I had missed the news.

I downloaded it and played through it with my son. It’s a wonderful game: eerie and detailed, with fun puzzles. I managed to solve all the puzzles myself except one.

The game has been out for quite a while, so I’m not going to review it, but I did want to share a glitch/bug that I came across while playing Scene 45.

In this scene, there are two goats and a dog. The first time I tried to solve it, I somehow invoked a bug which caused one goat to stop transforming into a chair when hit by a beam of light. This bug also made the puzzle unsolveable.

I restarted the game and came back to it later. For whatever reason, this puzzle vexed me for a while, and took me longer to solve than it should have. But I managed to cause this same glitch several times, so I realized it must be reproducible.

Today I revisited the scene and figured out how to reproduce the bug. If you’re interested, check out the video below. WARNING: the video contains spoilers and will describe how to solve the Scene 45 puzzle.

@online{renaud2021creaks,
  author       = {Josh Renaud},
  title        = {“Creaks” scene 45: Goat glitch},
  year         = {2021},
  month        = jan,
  organization = {Break Into Chat},
  url          = {https://breakintochat.com/blog/2021/01/17/creaks-scene-45-goat-glitch/},
  urldate      = {}
}

{{cite web |last=Renaud |first=Josh |title=“Creaks” scene 45: Goat glitch |website=Break Into Chat |url=https://breakintochat.com/blog/2021/01/17/creaks-scene-45-goat-glitch/ |date=2021-01-17 |access-date=}}