Ocean's Heart

First game of the year, even though I played most of it in 2024 still. Pretty nice Oldschool-Zelda-like. I bought it rather spontaneously a few days ago at a discount, tried it, got hooked and was kept busy by it until it was over. It was longer than expected (HLTB said 10-13h, I spent about 20 with the game) but I hardly ever thought about the length and always just wanted to see what's around the next corner. So that's a positive. It was a perfect game to play on my laptop, with only keyboard controls. Cute pixel art graphics, good music, lots of side quests, quite a few amusing ideas in the writing, the story was just enough for me to stay interested without getting distracted from all the free exploration and side questing, perfect for such a (semi) open world game.

The difficulty was very easy, in general, particularly in the final parts, after fully upgrading the weapons, when spamming basic attacks was often enough to win before health even got a chance to drop close to 0. It was a bit of a missed opportunity, I guess, that you get the major part of your special attacks only late in the game and that you can only ever assign two of them to your quick use keys. So I didn't even make an effort to fight with much variety. But for someone like me who hates bosses with patterns, I loved that I could just ignore them and brute force my way through combat. So others might find this more problematic, but for me it was another positive. It made sure that I could concentrate on exploration and puzzles without getting frustrated by combat too much (especially considering that opponents usually respawn when you re-enter an area). I also liked the addition of more modern features like quest journal and fast traveling points.

That being said, some things could have been more user-friendly. The overland map was pretty rudimentary and not that much of a help. No clear indications on how to get to anywhere, several of the named areas in the game did not even appear on the map, and there were no smaller maps of towns and such. You just have to memorize where every shop and NPC is located. There were also a lot of interesting things mentioned by NPCs or points of interest to discover in the world without the journal making note of it, so you still need pen and paper or a good memory to keep track of it all, even more so considering how big the world is and how confusing it can be to navigate through it and that you can't access some parts or solve some puzzles before gaining specific items or abilities. All that is very oldschool, and I while I appreciated all the little secrets to find, I wouldn't have minded some help in remembering them all, at least something like custom map pins or an in-game text editor for note writing or something.

It was also a bit inconvenient that items in the inventory did not come with descriptions. You only ever learn what spells, potions, and other consumables do when you find them in the world - not even when you craft something. And resources you gather don't even have names in the inventory, and I think they do not have any in the crafting menu either ... Plus, the difficulty and economy in the game was such that I collected a lot of consumables and resources but hardly ever did something with them, because I just didn't have to. I ended the game with much more money than I could possibly spend for useful items, as well.

I found it curious that you have to save the game manually, even though there's only one saveslot. On occasion that allowed me to go back a few steps and repeat dialogue I accidentally missed or avoid wasting consumables for nothing - one time I even got stuck on a glitch and quitting without saving literally saved me. But still, it was odd to have to go into the menu and save so often, rather than the game autosaving for me, when you don't even get different slots. Why not give players a quicksave button instead, at least?

And speaking of buttons, the game never explained how to assign abilities for quick use (you have to go to the inventory, select the ability and press X or V). It also never explained that while water and pits are hazardous for your character, you can hop over small gaps. For a while I didn't even realize these were passable. I also thought it was annoying when levers I had already pulled and obstacles that I had already overcome would reset at times, while doors usually stayed open. It didn't always seem consistent.

Still, these are all smaller nitpicks seeing how much I was entertained by the game. So all in all I give it a thumb's up.