Here's a demo for Reka, the bewitching forest fantasy game with the chicken-legged house

As I have now casually mentioned in about 400 news posts, I'm moving flat soon. During the quest for a new flat - a quest I would slot somewhere between return to Ravenholm in Half-Life 2 and the Shalebridge Cradle in Thief: Deadly Shadows in terms of overall hopefulness and unpleasant surprises - I toyed briefly with the idea of living in a mobile home.

You can find all kinds of weirdo moving property on Gumtree - houseboats, caravans, yurts, large coats, coffins - but they all share the disadvantage of being cramped and more expensive than described and inadequate to the power and internet needs of a Maxed-Out Videogame Journalist. If I'd seen a house with chicken legs, though? It'd have been worth the sacrifice. Just think, whenever James Archer gives me grief about my performance in Lethal Company I could send my house to step on him.

To live in a house with chicken legs you ideally need to be a witch. A witch like Reka, protagonist of the new PC fantasy exploration game Reka, in which you can summon ravens to gather mushrooms, curse the townsfolk, brew potions and feed berries to dancing wooden effigies. Reka now has a demo, which I have just tried to play on my crumbling work laptop (the review PC is in storage - for the 402nd time, I'm moving flat soon!) only for it to freeze up like Magrat Garlick talking to Granny Weatherwax. What I've played so far feels very promising, however.

Reka takes place in an ancient European forest, at the golden zenith of autumn, and I'm immediately enraptured by the spectacle of the low sun breaking through the trunks. It's reminiscent of, yes, I'm going to at once misrepresent and overhype this - Breath Of The Wild. There are hints of survival sim here - collect three sticks and six honeycombs, etc - but nothing like the usual day one lemming-rush to fell a million trees (on the Steam page, the developers position Reka as "a rich exploration game with base building and crafting elements").

It doesn't look like you'll be fashioning much in the way of hand-tools and gear; rather, you'll forage for brewing materials, items for use in spellcraft, and materials for your big gawky rooster of a witch's hovel. I haven't managed to build a chickenhouse yet, but Reka's world is perfectly absorbing even when traversed using your pitiful, non-reverse-jointed human legs and feet. It feels like a place of intrigue, reverie and enchantment, all things I tend to favour over scrounging the parts for an Upgraded Tanning Rack.

The demo includes the character generator and the first part of the game, which is due for release this year - I'm not sure whether progress carries over to the full thing. It's running as part of the latest LudoNarraCon Steam festival from 9th to 13th May. If you spy any LudoNarraCon demos that seem worth a write-up, I encourage you to feed them to the Maw.