Carimara: Beneath the Forlorn Limbs review: "Playing as a goblin thing to crack a gothic fairy tale mystery with magical cards has quickly become one of my favorite gaming short stories"

Playing as the Carimara, a mossy little creature that doesn't speak, it's your duty to instead listen. To question. After all, that's what the brusque old lady who called you to her little hut in the middle of a dark, tangled, thorny forest has hired you to do. One question it might be best to leave in order to get the job done is quite why she's so eager to pay for your services.

Something is stirring beneath the soil, in the network of tunnels that stretches below the old lady's house and surrounding grounds. A spirit with questions of its own. Luckily, as the Carimara, finding answers is your speciality. Not being able to speak doesn't mean you can't communicate. By looking at objects you can turn them into cards, able to use each one to stir the memories of your surroundings in order to unravel a folklore mystery – Carimara would sit snugly alongside Grimms' Fairy Tales.

Heart of the cards

The vibes of Carimara: Beneath the Forlon Limbs are immaculate. The lo-fi visual style paints a gorgeous picture of a dreary world, with a muted color palette and heavy shadows. This is a fairytale world that nevertheless packs texture. Interacting with each character has them get up in your face, answering your queries very bluntly in a way that bounces between comical and unsettling. Whether it's the Old Lady herself who's unwilling to let on too much, or the Owl that haunts her garden who's deliriously excited about the prospect of eating anything possible, each one makes an impact, sparking curiosity as I comb for secrets.

Essentially, collecting conversation topics from cards is like assembling your own verbs in an adventure game, giving you a new option to interact with specific points. For the most part, these topics allow you to tease more information about the magical situation you've found yourself in from those willing to talk. Knowledge is vital, with the densely designed cottage packing plenty of secrets that are never unfairly hidden, but which you often need to bring to light by poking around with your cards.

While you can safely sling cards around with most characters, some others will take less kindly to certain responses, causing you to black out and wake back up after time passes back in the cottage. As you do, the Old Lady will move around spots – a small detail that goes some way to making the world of Carimara feel a smidge more alive. Even though there's only a handful of environments, each one is rendered in stunning detail that invites you to really pore over every nook and cranny.

Even so, the Old Lady's house and the forest outside is limited, as are the amount of objects you can turn into magical cards. The lush design and attention to detail in Carimara does a lot to elevate the action, but ultimately the scope of investigation amounts to about the size of a single, fairly basic adventure game puzzle like you'd find in Monkey Island.

Carimara is a vignette – but one that welcomes you to nestle deep within its atmosphere of mystery in a way Guybrush Threepwood would never. No brainteasing element as you work towards finding a solution overstays its welcome, and the solutions are simple – but very satisfying writing makes reaching the conclusion really feel like something special.

Carimara: Beneath the Forlorn Limbs is a slight but wonderful mystery and, to be fair, it's only a few dollars for the privilege of puzzling it out for yourself (the developer even says in the credits that it'd be excellent to bring this puzzle formula forward into new adventures – which I'd love to see). Estimated to take a little over an hour to clear, it took me more like thirty minutes.

I'd love to have been given more to do – more cases, more locations, more strange characters to meet. But, this is an excellent short story that's a joy to play through as an interactive mystery, with a world and tale so strong that it'll stick with me as one of my favourite mystery games of 2025 with ease. I don't need to be a Carimara to deduce that this is something special indeed. Carimara: Beneath the Forlorn Limbs is out now on PC.

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