Oceanhorn: Monster of Uncharted Seas

A fun and fairly casual adventure game. The focus is on exploration, discovery, and secrets. Combat is easy and boss fights are trivial once you figure out their tricks. There's some RPG-style progression as you acquire new spells, items, and upgrades.

What's so curious about Oceanhorn is that it works despite every single element in the game not quite sticking the landing. For starters, there are nice parts to the story, which is vaguely about magic and technology and a lost civilization, but it's wrapped in clichés and obscure tangents. The English translation is bad, with many grammatical mistakes, which appear in the mediocre voice acting, too. The graphics are nice, but some of the animations are really subpar and mechanical, especially in the cut-scenes. The music is OK, but the sound effects are quite mediocre, especially the shuffling noises while walking. The many areas are generally fun to explore and figure out, but it's too common to get stuck and not know where in the world map you can actually make progress, so expect a lot of backtracking if you're not using a walkthrough. Also, for some reason the game is locked at 60 FPS. That's not horrible, but why lock it at all? Many gaming rigs would be able to easily go beyond that.

So much effort and care went into making this game, so it's just baffling that the devs didn't cover the final mile. For example, was it really so hard to find a native English speaker to go over the text? I remain confused.

Many reviewers compare Oceanhorn to Zelda and that does make sense, on various levels. It's actually suspiciously reminescent of how StarTropics borrowed from the original Legend of Zelda and relocated the setting to an island archipelago. To be fair, Oceanhorn does make attempts at carving its own identity. But, as I pointed out above, those ambitions seem somewhat half-hearted.

So, there a lot of problems with this game, right? But none of them is fatal, and truly the experience as a whole exceeds the sum of its parts. Whether it's original or not, or well-polished or not, none of that mattered to me as I delighted in another island popping up on my map, ready to be explored and plundered. [I]Oceanhorn[/I] delivers a satisfying adventure at just the right length, and I look forward to playing the sequel.