Oceanhorn: Monster of Uncharted Seas Impressions

After my first hour of play my suspicions of Oceanhorn being a Zelda clone feel pretty validated. However the environment design is very voxel-ish, the landscape feels very much like Dragon Quest Builders or Minecraft; there are multiple layers of land that the main character can scale if they're close enough but must find stairs or ramps to ascend or descend otherwise. The camera is nearly fixed at an isometric angle, you can lean it to the left and right a little with the right analog stick but I haven't found that to be useful yet. The animation is a little choppy; the main character snaps to face any new direction you want to go in and the movement->combat transitions jitter just a bit. But I stopped paying attention once the puzzles were introduced because I began focusing more on the environment trying to visualize the solution. The controls are very responsive, I haven't felt any delay or muddiness during combat at all.

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The landscape is very rectilinear.

When you're on the sea you get free look and you can shoot at things.

Approaching an island is automatic, you actually softly crash into the pier before leaping onto the dock.

On one of the inhabited islands we have a Not-Zora living in a cave requesting rare collectibles.

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The story goes that during the prologue your father has a long-standing rivalry with a giant steam-powered crustacean automaton called Oceanhorn. Just before the title comes up he goes off on one stormy night to confront Oceanhorn and he disappears. Your mission, should you choose to accept it quest is to seek out the lost trinkets of mystical power that will surely defeat Oceanhorn once and for all. To do this you must explore the islands around where you woke up, fighting enemies, solving dungeons, learning new tricks, etc. As you explore each island and talk to people and read messages in bottles, you will learn of more islands that are in the area that you can sail to, the game even recommends that you go to each new island as soon as you learn of it. Sailing is much simpler than in Zelda WindWaker in that you merely need to navigate to the island and the boat just goes to it. There are boxes, mines, and knock-off Octorocks for you to shoot with your boat-mounted rifle while in transit, but so far they only provide XP and some gold.

Each island has a "percent complete" banner under its name on the world map so there are definitely reasons to go back and see them again once you have more equipment. For example I have so far discovered throwable bombs and a magic spell that allows me to press buttons remotely which may allow me to unlock new paths on the islands I've been to already, though I don't recall anything heavily hinting at what tool or magic I needed to surpass the barricades. That may be me unfairly comparing it to the Zelda series and their relative consistency of environmental hints across games.

The game definitely grows on you, the more comfortable you get with the control scheme and the more familiar the art style becomes, it's much easier to let your focus wander to see what's around you. The puzzles aren't mind-benders, and you should be able to visualize the solution to the block pushing puzzles before you have to push one. One thing though: near each block puzzle, there is a reset switch in-game you can step on to return the push blocks to their original positions. There is one particularly clever puzzle where you are in a narrow corridor and you need to get a push block behind you; in order to do this you push the block beyond where the reset switch is and reset its position so you can double back and take it to where you need it. I enjoyed figuring that one out.

I would definitely recommend this game. It's not a "get this now" title, I doubt any indie game on Steam is, but if you can find it on sale for 50% off there are certainly worse things you can spend $7.50 on. According to IsThereAnyDeal.com the historic low price on Steam has been $6 and other 3rd party sites have had it down to $4 and change. If you're looking for an adventure game that's like Zelda but not, this is a good option.

Playthrough 005: Oceanhorn - Monster of Uncharted Seas

Sorry for no post last week, I got overloaded with tech week for a play I was hired to do lighting design for. Things will continue apace going forward.

The fifth game I'm playing is Oceanhorn: Monster of Uncharted Seas.

Released on March 17th, 2015 Oceanhorn currently has User review ratings of "Very Positive" with both Recent and Overall groups being over 80% positive.

I bought it a little over a year ago in the Humble Jumbo Bundle 6, though I had never heard of it before then. From the Steam page it looks like an isometric, Fully-3D Legend of Zelda clone which raises my expectations a bit, possibly unfairly, because I've been playing through some of my other Zelda games again since I don't have Breath of the Wild yet and I'm sorely pining for it.

In the announcements the latest post from the dev is a maintenance update that went live last Friday which is really cool that they're supporting their game even two years after release.

Breath of Death VII Impressions

As I suspected, the game plays very much like the early Final Fantasies. Much of the art seems to be limited to the NES color palette, the overworld reminds me a lot of the Zelda 2 overworld. However the character design is a little more layered than FF1. You walk around the overworld looking for monsters to kill and you get XP from them.

There are several things I really like about the battle system. After each battle you win, your entire party is revived and healed up to full health and they all get XP. So no more hoarding of revives, and hoping that you get a turn to bring one of your party back to life before you kill all the enemies. The bonuses awarded in leveling up are an A/B choice with various trade-offs between the two options. For example several characters can choose to have their next spell be a single target with higher chance to do secondary damage, or target all with a reduced chance.

Combat goes fairly quickly, you select your attacks and targets for all your party members and they are then slotted into the battle order based on initiative checked against the monsters. You click through each attack event until the next round. If one of your party goes down to 50% health the interface outlines go from white to green, and of one or more of your party dies, it goes from green to red. You have to pay attention to how much damage the enemy attacks can do so that you can heal your party in the right round of battle. This is made slightly difficult because every round the monsters get 10% more powerful.

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The overworld map is very similar to every NES RPG ever.

The cities are pleasant and filled with friendly ghosts and other undead beings. 

The battle screen is static with sound effects and flashes indicating action.

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As for the story, it is a post-apocalyptic adventure cast entirely with the undead. You start as the main character, a skeleton by the name of Dem Bones, who quickly meets up with a ghost named Sara who forces you to become her bodyguard as she wants to explore some ruins to the East to learn more about the history of the world. When you arrive at the ruins you meet a technology-obsessed Vampire named Lita who also joins your party. The boss of the ruins is a robot who has been "switched to Evil" so Sara decides that the part should take over the robot's quest to collect the six crystals of macguffin in the city on the center of the map and bring them to some place in a desert. You meet your fourth and final party member, a zombie prince named Erik, when you're thrown into the castle prison of the next town. It seems that Erik's uncle, the king of the castle, has become obsessed with throwing people into jail. That's as far as I got in my play session, I assume the boss of the jail dungeon is either a souped-up jailer, or Erik's uncle the Mad Zombie King.

My biggest complaint about the game is that the enemies in various sections of the overworld, and in the dungeons, seem to be scaled the level that Zeboyd thinks the party should be, rather than actually scaled to the party. As soon as I got halfway through the ruins after Lita joined the party I began getting defeated nearly every other battle. I had to go two areas back just to find some mobs that I could defeat without using skills. This isn't so bad in the overworld where you can get to lower-level enemy areas fairly quickly, but when you're in the dungeons you're pretty much fucked because all mobs are roughly the same level, and if you're not quite powerful enough you're going to have a long, hard ride through the labyrinth.

Speaking of which, the dungeons are huge. This is awesome if your party is strong enough, you can go around exploring because there are at least five chests with either better equipment or large amounts of gold in them. They are hidden down long, snaking paths that frequently turn back on themselves so you have to keep in mind where you're trying to get to. If you're just trying to get out, that can be a real pain in the ass, because backtracking just wastes more time on the countdown to the next mob attack.

All in all, I'd recommend it if you're a fan of older NES/SNES-styled JRPGs. It's fun to have the protagonists be various undead creatures, Dem actually can't speak since he's just a skeleton so Sara "interprets" his thoughts to communicate to the other party members. It's bundled in a 2-pack with Cthulhu Saves the World for $3 retail, Cthulhu is a similar JRPG with art that's updated to look more like SNES game.

February Game Purchases

Here are the Steam games I bought in February:

The Humble Namco Bandai Bundle 2

• Pac-Man 256
• Ace Combat: Assault Horizon
• Enslaved: Odyssey to the West
• Warhammer 40,000: Eternal Crusade
• Project CARS
• Naruto Shippuden: Ultimate Ninja Storm 3 Full Burst
• Tales of Zestiria
• Attractio
• Arcade Game 3-in-1 Pack: Pac-Man, Dig-Dug, Galaga

The Humble Star Wars Bundle 3

• Star Wars Starfighter
• Star Wars Rebel Assault 1 & 2
• Star Wars The Force Unleashed
• Star Wars The Force Unleashed 2
• Star Wars Rogue Squadron 3D
• Star Wars Shadows of the Empire

The Humble Freedom Bundle

• The Witness
• Stardew Valley
• Subnautica
• Overgrowth
• Nuclear Throne
• Invisible, Inc.
• Octodad: Dadliest Catch
• World of Goo
• No Time to Explain Remastered
• Thirty Flights of Loving
• Spirits
• ROCKETSROCKETSROCKETS
• 2064: Read Only Memories
• 7 Grand Steps, Step 1: What Ancients Begat 
• Retro Game Crunch
• Song of the Deep
• AI War: Fleet Command
• Sproggiwood Enlightened Edition
• Hot Tin Roof: The Cat That Wore a Fedora
• Jones on Fire
• Secrets of Rætikon
• Girls Like Robots
• Ellipsis
• Ninja Pizza Girl
• Robot Roller-Derby Disco Dodgeball
• Q.U.B.E. Director's Cut
• Rituals
• Dangerous High School Girls In Trouble
• Super Galaxy Squadron EX
• TIMEframe
• Potatoman Seeks the Troof
• Ballistick
• Team Indie
• Luna's Wandering Stars
• Shutshimi
• Beat Hazard Ultra

Steam Store Purchases

• Transformers: Devastation
• Astroneer

Total spent: $88.98 on 53 games

The Humble Freedom Bundle was a completely bonkers deal that came out of nowhere the week of February 13th. It began as $30 for 39 games and some digital books and comics and by the end the full game roster had expanded to a total of 60 games and even more digital books and comics along with an album and a Documentary about the making of Double-Fine's Broken Age. Even though I owned 17 of the original 39 offered the ones I didn't own were enough to make the bundle an insta-buy for me regardless that I had already purchased both the Namco Bandai Bundle 2 and the Star Wars Bundle 3 in the weeks beforehand.