![]() That is really the true failing of Sea of Solitude. ![]() Given that I’ve been through most of the trauma that the game describes myself you’d think it’d be a slam dunk but, in all honesty, it felt like someone from the outside trying to tell my own story back to me. The ham-fisted approach to working through the various emotional challenges, typically done by using stereotypical exposition of scenes associated with them (Bullied at school, career focused father, depressive boyfriend), makes it hard to truly resonate with the story. The voice acting isn’t particularly great, feeling devoid of emotion save for a few choice scenes that happen later in the game. There’s no real one issue at play here, more the culmination of the various storytelling choices removed any kind of empathy I had for any of the characters. Sea of Solitude warns you straight up that it’s going to deal with some heavy emotional content but what follows fails to really deliver any emotional impact whatsoever. These things aren’t beyond fixing so I hope future patches will smooth these things out. Most notably this happens with the boat which makes navigating around with it quite a pain. This then extends to the rather unwieldy controls which make most things a little more challenging to navigate than they otherwise should be. I tried doing everything I could think of with my mouse and nothing seemed to work, until I started wiggling it wildly only to find that the game had dropped the sensitivity way down, requiring quite a few long passes across the mouse pad to get the beam moving. For starters it’s not completely clear on communicating its mechanics to you, most notably during the first light beam puzzle which tells you to “focus” with the mouse…somehow. ![]() The game also has a few rough edges that could do with some sorting out. Thankfully the game doesn’t require frame level precision nor are any of the puzzles minutes long sequences that need repeating upon failing so you won’t be struggling for hours on end to get past something. There’ll be times when you’re pretty sure you’ve made a jump or calculated your timing perfectly only to be slapped down unceremoniously. Many of them are platform based which, as anyone who’s played 3D platformers before will tell you, means there’s a certain unwieldiness to them. Some of them are unforgiving though, sending you all the way back to the start of the puzzle should you happen to time something wrong. With all the puzzles being self contained it’s usually not terribly difficult to figure out what needs to be done. Altogether Sea of Solitude is a pretty simple game mechanically and isn’t likely to challenge most players. There’s two sets of collectibles for you to track down although whether or not they actually change the game in any appreciable way is unclear. Indeed that’s pretty much Sea of Solitude in a nutshell: you’ll move between various different platforms (quite literally most of the time too), working your way through until you hit a puzzle that requires you to solve before going on. Instead I feel that games like this are more akin to puzzle platformers as their puzzles are typically self contained and usually heavily blended in platform elements. I’ve shied away from calling games like Sea of Solitude “adventure” titles as, in my mind, that’s games like the old school LucasArts titles and their more modern equivalents. Overall the games visuals are quite good for Jo-Mei’s first all inhouse, standalone title. ![]() Animations are a little on the simplistic side however, feeling like they’ve mostly been hand cranked which makes some characters look a lot more stilted than they should be. However the internal level parts are brimming with detail, each which their own distinctive style (something which I’m sure the level designers are quite proud of). The wider world isn’t exactly filled out well with a lot of noticeable asset reuse, making a lot of the more open parts of the world feel very samey. Sea of Solitude’s art style is the ever-trendy low poly chic that nearly every indie game seems to be implementing these days. It’s up to you to guide her through the pain and, hopefully, come out the other side healed. Your journey is then one of exploring her past, uncovering the trauma that has created the monsters that now inhabit this sunken world. ![]() Those monsters are of her own creation however, stemming from events in her past that she has yet to deal with fully. Her boat is her only respite from the deep waters that are inhabited by monsters who taunt her endlessly. You play as Kay who finds herself in a world that’s been consumed by the sea with only a few scarce buildings popping out over the waves. ![]()
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