Posted on: June 30, 2025
squareinc
Jeux: 951 Avis: 11
An Empty Sea
A very average, very inconsequential adventure game. It starts off promising, with a woman Norah in search for her husband and a cure for her illness on a mysterious, cursed island, but quickly devolves into a monotonous trek. Almost all of it has to do with its execution and delivery. For all its supposed stakes, Norah is too blasé about everything. It feels like I'm not the one playing an adventure game, but her. Nothing is serious. There is no gravitas to the story. There's also no real story to the story. Or at least no good one. It's very predictable and bland. Around the first two hours in I was driven only by the slight mechanical delight which came from solving the game's puzzles. Nothing about the story compelled me to see its end. And the puzzles are okay. Most of them can be broken down into 'how do these clues in my journal represent the big puzzle in front of me right now'. Once you realise that, it's just a matter of looking for similarities between the big puzzle and the clues. They were nothing to write home about, but they were okay. The quadrant puzzle, however, was badly explained and took my a long time to figure out. The rest seemed to be a decent challenge. The voice acting by Norah vacillates between serviceable and below-average. She never sells the story or any real emotion. The other voice acting is pretty bad. Her husband, Harry, sounds less like a 1930's adventurer and more like a millennial using therapy-speak at a coffee shop. The writing is also pretty subpar. It evokes nothing but the bare minimum exposition required for coherence. The music is alright but anemic, hardly playing and quick to disappear. The graphics look nice and the art style is fetching; but the art direction, so intertwined with the story, falls flat too often. Overall, I didn't really care for Call of the Sea. There's nothing mortally wrong with it, but in a life with too little time and an abundance of games, I don't think I'd ever recommend it.
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