Judero is a psychedelic trip through Scottish folklore

Judero, released for PC on Sept. 16, swings for the fences with a do-it-yourself spirit that sets the game apart from both its AAA and indie contemporaries. As the first game developed by Talha and Jack Co — Talha Kaya (Soul Searching, Pill Baby) and Jack King-Spooner (Beeswing, Dujanah) — it’s the perfect example of the duo’s arthouse sensibilities and the trail of captivating projects that led them to working together.

Everything in Judero is handcrafted, and I mean everything: The eponymous hero, the various beasties with which he battles, and even the logo on the pause screen had real-world analogues before they were implemented as digital assets in the Kickstarter- and UK Games Fund-financed action-adventure game. Many were molded from clay, King-Spooner’s latent fingerprints visible on their grainy surfaces in stop-motion cutscenes, while others feature the conspicuous ball-joints of action figures, broken apart and reassembled as puppets to fit the needs of the sentimental narrative.

“I often feel a bit distant from the art in video games because it’s not immediately clear how they were made,” King-Spooner said in a behind-the-scenes video he released shortly before Judero’s launch. “I feel that the humanity is kept at arm’s length. Not everyone knows what a normal map is, or UV mapping, but most people have squished some clay. You know, sometimes I know what I’m making, sometimes I sort of know, sometimes I just mess about and see what comes out.”

Judero places you in the well-worn boots and kilt of a Celtic druid to whom you’re introduced in medias res as he tramps through the countryside in search of wrongs to right. He’s a good-natured sort, with a thick, Scottish burr — don’t expect him to repeat “purple burglar alarm” without some difficulty — and a wild beard that belies his gentle disposition. Our hero carries a giant staff and, by the end of the game, can call upon an array of skills, both martial and magical, to dispatch foes and solve puzzles. But his true strength (and really, the strength of the game as a whole) lies in conversation, not battle or exploration.

Over the course of my half-dozen hours with Judero, I was blown away by how much dialogue there was. Every person Judero meets, be they a random villager or a hallucination of a pink ape, is ready to pontificate at length about goings-on in their lives as well as heavier topics like the afterlife, existentialism, religion, political activism, and so, so much more — little of which has to do with the quest at hand. They talk, and Judero listens. Some of their thoughts and concerns feel detached from the game’s fairy-tale trappings, as if the developers are speaking to you, the player, directly. The texture found in the game’s long-winded monologues is just as vital to the experience as that of Judero’s superhero body and modeling clay features.

Judero’s organic and imprecise approach to narrative feels evocative in many ways of King-Spooner’s self-declared appreciation for the randomness of tactile materials over the precision of digital tools.

“I find it easier to make things this way,” King-Spooner told Talha Kaya, his future collaborator on Judero, during an interview in 2015. “Pixel stuff isn’t very expressive to me, no space for experimenting or for mistakes to happen. It’s really derivative and there is something sad about the exactitude and perfectionism that goes into it. If you soak a piece of paper and drip ink onto it, the ink bleeds into the paper in the most incredible way. If you have a glass of water and pour a bit of milk into it, it’s just great to watch. If you play the same note over and over on a piano for two minutes with the sustain pedal down, then add a harmony, the resonance is sublime.”

While I’m not quite ready to write off digital art entirely, I find a lot of truth in King-Spooner’s ethos. The muddy, uneven complexions of his Judero models feel more real than any of the hyper-realistic Soulslikes or military shooters tearing up the Steam charts. When a giant monster crawls over painted scenery and through cotton shrubbery in a live-action cutscene, the environment squishes and bends realistically because, well, the developers set up a camera and recorded it as it really happened. The sensation that you could reach out and touch the figures on the screen is a unique one for a video game, and somehow simply knowing that they exist on a workbench in an art studio somewhere in Scotland goes a long way toward making Judero more than the sum of its parts.

As my time with Judero came to a close, I felt more like a kid watching a library puppet show than an aging writer sitting in front of his laptop with a DualSense controller. Just like a child might ignore the nylon strings holding a marionette aloft or the arm disappearing up a dummy’s backside, I was more than willing to overlook some inconsistent gameplay in order to fully give myself over to the game’s psychedelic adventure. Judero is special in a way video games often no longer aspire to be, melding the developers’ artistic sensibilities with the unique interactivity of the medium into an experience that feels just as untamed as the Scottish fairy tales from which it draws inspiration.

Judero was released on Windows PC on Sept. 16. It was reviewed on PC using a copy of the game purchased by the author. Vox Media has affiliate partnerships. These do not influence editorial content, though Vox Media may earn commissions for products purchased via affiliate links. You can find additional information about Polygon’s ethics policy here.