Developer/Publisher: Cornfox & Bros
Platform: PC
Genre: Adventure, 3-d, Action, Puzzle solving
Gameplay Stats: 14 hours, Game completed, all islands 100%, 56/63 achievements
With the recent release of Link's Awakening remake on the Switch, I've got kind of a Zelda itch! My little sister recommended Oceanhorn to me a while back saying it was similar to a Zelda game and it's been collecting dust in my Steam library, so... Let's give it a shot!
Visuals: Going into the game, I didn't realize it was 4 years old at this point. I thought it was a little bit ugly, but knowing its age now, I think it probably looks fairly standard. It's the weird slightly rounded aesthetic with a 3/4 point of view. I think my big issue here is that the visual design of the game isn't very communicative. There were a few times where I thought that enemies would be friendly and I walked into them and there were a few times where I was genuinely stuck. Enemies standing still with no visible weapons and no aggro certainly struck me as an NPC. And then struck my character as an enemy should. There were two times in the game where I was legitimately stuck and had to check walkthroughs. In both of these cases, I needed to bomb a seemingly ordinary looking wall that opened up a passage to progress. This is bad communication! If I had infinite bombs, maybe it wouldn't have been so annoying, but these really rubbed me the wrong way.
Audio: I think the songs may have been my favorite part of this game. I don't know who the composer was, but I think they actually have a solid career ahead of them. Unfortunately there are only like 4 songs in the game, so by the end they have really overstayed their welcome. When I booted the game up after a couple days away though, I was always happy to hear the familiar tunes. For the first few minutes and then I was back to being mildly annoyed. The sound effects are genuinely bad. Two different groans, one grunt, a swipe and a squish. You will here these sounds so very much that you will hate them.
Plot: The plot here was actually kind of fine. The story was simple and definitely took a backseat, but it served to get the main character out and exploring. Gotta destroy that mecha-shrimp! There were a couple spots where the game tried to elicit an emotional response from the player, but there wasn't any build up. The game conveys very little emotion, the character models can't emote and the voice actors don't seem to be able to either, so the spots where emotions are supposed to be brought forward fall very flat.
Gameplay: The game plays fine! It really does feel a little like a Zelda game, in that way it kind of scratched my itch. You get to run around a 3d-ish world and hack your way through some cute enemies. There are some very minor puzzles to solve, but they're simple. They added some minor leveling mechanics to the Zelda formula which is interesting. Instead of hiding bomb bag upgrades in the world, they are given by defeating enemies or completing one of 3 arbitrary goals found on each island. It's an interesting idea! I think I prefer doing little side quests, but I can see how this would be easier to implement.
A couple of additional things that I didn't know going into the game that shape my overall impressions: the game was made for mobile, and this game was the first game made by the developers. I do still think this game is a bit rough, but I think it's a good first try. Google results make me believe that there may be an Oceanhorn 2 in the works. I'm going to read over the reviews pretty closely when it does come out for PC. I found this game to be kind of frustrating, but I can definitely see some promise for the developer. I don't know that I would really recommend this game, but I wouldn't say that the game was bad either. [6/10]
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