This game is great! There is a lot that I really like, and there were parts that I didn't like so much. There were also some issues that I wanna address, and hopefully the devs will fix it. With it being a relatively new release, I expect these problems to get fixed given enough time.
The first thing I want to touch up on is the art. The 3D world with 2D characters is a very nice mix. I really liked roaming around and discovering [spoiler] the bottles with comic-book styled art [/spoiler]. It was a very nice addition to giving me a reason to go out and look around at the world built around me.
The characters had a nice well-rounded personality that was fun to engage with and I really liked going around and interacting with them.
Controlling the boat also was pretty intuitive and fun. I liked the wind-up idea where you're more of a toy-boat rather than a massive vessel you're controlling. Unlocking small things to navigate the environment, getting [spoiler] upgrades [/spoiler] as well as other things felt very rewarding. Though I was stupid and managed to miss the [spoiler] speed upgrades [/spoiler] until the very end of the game lol.
The gameplay felt relatively intuitive and I enjoyed going around and doing all the quests! I think the game is worth trying out.
Now my gripes with the game. (It looks like a lot, I'm just describing them in detail for the devs, there's not a ton)
This could have just been me, but the fact it happened, tells me there might not have been enough QA to catch these small things. At the very beginning of the game, (minor spoiler) [spoiler] where you're supposed to save the crocodile from the tree and place him in your ship, [/spoiler] I didn't know I was supposed to do that initially. I had gone a little up and realized that's what I was supposed to do after seeing the sign saying "Place Here." I put the two in frame and moved him from the tree to the raft. This is not the order you're supposed to do things, and in doing so, you hard-lock your game. I thought I was able to fix it, moving to the brick wall on the left, talking to [spoiler] the map bird guy [/spoiler], but this somehow managed to make half of my keybinds not work, my ship with stuck not being able to move unless I wanted it to sound like a fighter jet, and I had to completely delete my save and start over.
With this being the very beginning of the game, it wasn't hard to just restart, but it made me worried of what other sequence breaks that could completely destroy my entire save. (I didn't have anything break after this, but that was an example of one I found). There were a couple other places [spoiler] the orange juice salesman [/spoiler] for example, where conversation upon completion of a quest didn't match the actual event that took place until AFTER the reward was claimed, causing a bit of confusion on my part.
Some quests were a bit confusing, and I had to go to some obscure threads to figure out what I was doing wrong, some quests I still didn't figure out and wound up dropping the game out of frustration. This is very likely due to me not remembering what I was told by the NPC, but I would say that if you interact with an NPC, you should be able to be retold what you are meant to do. A good example would be the [spoiler] pyramid [/spoiler] quest and the [spoiler] painter [/spoiler] quest. The [spoiler] pyramid [/spoiler] quest tells you what to do the first time around, but I missed that explanation. Going to him afterwards just has him say [spoiler] "You have X more pyramids to go!" [/spoiler] with no further explanation of what they are, or what you are supposed to do. I never figured out the [spoiler] painting [/spoiler] quest. I found the locations, but what I had to do there was far from what I could figure out. Another quest was the [spoiler] stick quest from the mushroom [/spoiler]. I assumed that you had to [spoiler] look for a stick somewhere, but I never found one going around the map several times. [/spoiler]
Another small thing was the GUI interface. Interacting with it worked, but it was clunky most of the time. When hovering over the options, it would very consistently not actually click the option, and I had to do a bunch of guess work to figure out the hitbox of the text. My best guess is that the collision logic with the menu and my mouse was being weird on the math. It could be that I'm on a 1440p monitor, but if that's the case, it should be looked into and fixed, because that was a bit annoying to deal with.
These are small things, and they didn't necessarily ruin my experience, it was just enough to frustrate me not 100% the game like I had intended once I had completed the main quest-line. I think a very simple fix to mitigate these issues is figure out the menus on different resolutions, changing some dialogue to give more context for the user, potentially adding markers for players having a hard time locating structures or key-items, and potentially being a bit more clear with the goal of things.
All in all, the game is great, and I don't want my cons to sound like the game is a lost cause or not worth your time. I played through the entire game with only a few gripes, and with them being easily fixable, I expect those small changes to make this game much better than it currently is. Obviously oversights happen, and indie development is rough, so I'm giving them the benefit of the doubt on this one. I thoroughly enjoyed this game, and I hope y'all do too! I will edit this review if the developers wind up fixing any of the above issues so that it doesn't always look like it's a persistent problem to worry about.
