Ogu and the Secret Forest

A gem of a game from Korean developer Moonlab Studio, which deserves much more attention than it has received so far.

The simple summary is that Ogu wraps a cheerful, whimsical, childlike world around a 2D-Zelda-like core, but the game feels bigger than just that. Ogu is packed with delightful side shows: puzzles, secrets, minigames, several RPG systems, and boss fights. And for completionists there's a wealth of optional stuff to do (and collect) to get to 100%, but more on that later. Most of the challenges you will face will seem relatively easy if you've played such games before, but that's OK, because they are almost always delightful.

The fun did seem to take a bit of a break for me in the late game. Though the game usually does a good job at holding your hand, there were a few non-optional puzzles that were quite obscure indeed, relying on you remembering (or writing down) notes that you've seen in unrelated places. These crucial hints were not recorded in the quest information. It felt like a sudden and unwarranted leap in difficulty. Perhaps it needed more playtesting to point out where players could get lost.

On that note, some of the game systems do seem a bit unbaked. There are fishing and cooking minigames, but there's no in-game rationale for exploring either. I finished the game without cooking once.

Also not fun is getting to 100% completion. You need to collect a lot of items, but these annoyingly appear from random drops, many of which are quite rare. It's not "hard", but it is immensely tedious. I skipped that goal.

Finally, it's worth nothing that there is some awkwardness in the narrative, or rather its form. The story revolves around divine-magical entities, but these are called "God", capitalized, presenting a jarring religious overlay on this otherwise quaint fantasy. Other oddities in the English text lead me to believe that this "God" stuff is the result of an unintentional cultural mistranslation. In any case, it's easy enough to roll with it and enjoy.

So, what are you waiting for? Put on your adventuring hat, inhabit a chubby baby platypus, and save the world!