RKGK / Rakugaki Review – Platforming And Speed At Its Finest

Only a month ago, I was in awe over the style of a brand new experience of a trailer for a game known as RKGK. Instantly, I was hyped and added it to my Wishlist. I was excited to see more of what the game was about and how it worked as a girl against the world with nothing but a spray can.

Game Name: RKGK / Rakugaki
Platform(s): PC (Reviewed)
Developer(s): Wabisabi Games
Publisher(s): Gearbox Publishing
Release Date: May 22nd, 2024
Price: $19.99

In RKGK, you step into the shoes of Valah. Valah is a girl frustrated at how society has been taken over by technology and brainwashed televisions by Mr. Buff. She notices using her spray paint over a TV can shut down the link it has over people nearby. That’s when she decides she wants to tear it all down. Using her speed and a can of paint, Valah is determined to make the world a better one through color.

Sticking It To Mr. Buff

RKGK has a fast-paced gameplay loop that is based on its momentum and awareness. Each chapter is sectioned into areas with a variety of stages that you have to complete before fighting one of the big bad creations of Mr. Buff. These stages usually lean heavily into certain aspects of Valah’s kit. With the speed she gains by drifting on paint from her spray can, one of the stages could be heavily reliant on grinding rails or doing dashes at certain intervals correctly. Each stage usually helps you perfect various techniques to complete the stage quickly.

Speed, however, isn’t all that is focused on in a stage. To amass the most points usually means finding all the TVs to paint over, all the gold coins, and the hidden three ghosts throughout. These ghosts are usually in hard-to-find or reach locations. TVs are located in your path to the end goal of the stage, breaking the monolith at the end. You can use paint to drift and speed up Valah’s normal speed. You can jump, dash, or even dive under obstacles. If you chain your moves together without getting hit and collecting coins, you will unlock Defacer mode, which increases your speed, especially with the paint drifts. If you drift into enemies while using Defacer mode, it can auto-kill them. It also auto-destroys the boxes and breakable objects in your path.

Boss fights at the end of chapters are more like survival obstacle courses instead of a traditional boss fight. Survive by ducking under obstacles, and then when the boss gets tired, you can attack a robot, which will then put the boss in an exhausted or stunned state. Once that happens, you can pull out your spray can and paint on a TV connected to it in some way. Do this three times, the boss gets defeated, and the next chapter unlocks.

Vibing To The Beat

The art of RGKG is great, and many of the levels’ designs are pretty interesting. You have a selection of graffiti types you can buy from the shop in the game. After each chapter, a new vendor or character appears at your hideout. The first one lets you get outfits with coins. Many of those outfits have colors and inspirations from other media, a ton from popular anime series. The next one is a vendor for graffiti, and your character will cover the screens you find in the game. Other vendors you find will have other things you can buy with ghosts you collect in the game.

This game runs solid on Steam Deck at 60 FPS and 720p. On PC with my RTX 3060 Graphics card, the game can run uncapped, which netted me from 100-120 fps on a 1080p monitor. When I went to do speed runs of levels to get faster speeds, I would typically try playing it on my PC. Having the Steam Deck for searching levels casually for ghosts or hidden paths and screens was great. I could go through the whole game on Steam Deck, but I only had a few levels that would make it dip into the 50s. One level, in particular, would go high 40s, though, when it had lots of things happening on screen. Overall a solid performance though.

The Shoe Doesn’t Always Fit

RKGK has fun moments, but also, pieces don’t always add up, and in some instances, can be downright frustrating. The double jumping is nice, but sometimes the character doesn’t grab onto the ledges. There are also times when, even when you press the right button, Valah will decide to drop off the face of the earth instead of moving on to the rail or enemy. In most instances, you can chuck it up as a gimmick of the game, but when things are meant to be precise for timing and speed, like when you do speed running of levels, it gets annoying. Especially when the final bosses of the game require so much precision to make sure you are at the exact specific locations to not get hit. I had to repeat the final boss multiple times due to missing a dash or having a drift jump not propel as far as it could. When levels are forgiving and account for this and just drop you a floor down, it’s fine, but often, it will make you have to start a specific rail grinding segment again or just flat-out start the whole checkpointed area again.

This might be more of a nitpick, but most levels have a transparent purple orb that, once pressed, will spawn red coins that can be timed out if you don’t get them in time. If you succeed, it will lead to a ghost or a hidden path. If you don’t succeed, the path will disappear, and the coins will be gone unless you restart the entire level. When I was clearing out objectives, I would do an all-ghost run or an all-coins run for maximum coins since if you collect all coins in a level, it will give you a ghost and a mark on the game level. Having the purple orb time out and not appearing again made it difficult to do one of these. I would have to restart the level to do the timed coin collection again. I did not like missing a single coin and having to restart the whole level just to retry getting the secret coins again. I wish that were something that could just reappear again if you missed it.

Art Meets Vision

RKGK, overall, is a great platformer. It has moments I wasn’t too keen on with boss fights and mechanics overall but the game is solid for the scope and passion it tries for. If you love the 3D platformers of yesteryear with unlockables and collectibles, this might be the game for you. If not, it’s $19.99, and you could have spent worse.

RKGK is available on PC.

Review Disclosure Statement: RKGK was provided to us by Gearbox Publishing for review purposes. For more information on how we review video games and other media/technology, please review our Review Guideline/Scoring Policy.

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