Wavetale (2021)

A simple ocean surfing game with light combat elements and a cozy and predictable story. Think the sand-surfing level from Journey, but with voice acting and a specific plot.

The Good: A rarity in games outside of the indie space, this game features a specific art direction that will help it to feel timeless going forward. Gameplay is simple and enjoyable with only a few points of friction, mostly when dealing with platforming elements that don't have to do with surfing the water. Voice acting is sweet, enjoyable most of the time, and not distracting as it can be with some indie titles.

The Bad: All the usual rough edges of an indie game. Combat and movement is floaty and imprecise. I got stuck on level geometry more than once causing me to have to reload my checkpoint save. The story didn't quite hit the emotional notes it was hoping to hit, at least for me (it could have used another editing pass). There were parts of the world, the story, and the mechanics that felt unpolished and unfinished.

The Verdict: A short and enjoyable title. Grab it on sale or pay full price if you want to support an indie-dev. But there are better examples of games like this; better combat, better stories, and better gameplay.

A light narrative adventure with a charming premise and a lovely art style that's extremely faithful to Ellinor Richey's concept art. It activates a few of the same parts of my brain as the first Jak and Daxter game, but I'm having a tough time articulating exactly why... the waterlogged islands? The way attacks stun enemies? NPCs speaking to you via radio? I'm not quite sure, but I like it.

The controls feel like an area for improvement. Many times a grappling point would highlight but wouldn't trigger without an extra button-tap or two. Gliding over the water feels a bit odd: A little jerky, with no feeling of cutting through or reacting to the waves. But the game wasn't demanding enough or long enough for these critiques to impede my enjoyment.

OVERALL I really enjoyed the game. I liked the cell shade style, the world felt expansive, and it didn't complicate the mechanics. My favourite part was transversing the world. Once I got into a flow it was really fun to skim across the water, leap over waves, dive and glide alongside your shadow underneath the surface.

STORY Not much to say. Since the game was so short it never explores any concepts, themes, or character arcs very deeply. To the game's credit there were a ton of characters that you could read little bios about after you meet them which helped the world feel populated and gave the climax weight as a lot of people would be effected.

GAMEPLAY The tutorial sucked. I figured out controls way earlier than they bothered telling me in the game (like how to ground slam, I was doing that ages before) but more importantly it didn't explain less intuitive ones. For example I didn't know you could sprint in the air and there was a part of the game where I couldn't reach the checkpoint and I had to look up how to do it.

The fighting was basic: hit and dodge. It was pretty chill which was nice, but did get boring.

The side quests were simply padding that didn't add anything to the story or reward your efforts with combat or equipment upgrades. Easily skippable with nothing of value lost.

MOVEMENT AND CONTROLS My favourite part of the game. It was soothing and once I got into a rhythm I was in my element. I also liked the simple fighting mechanics (although, it never grew in difficulty which is a point against it - the game would have really benefited from having different difficulty settings to increase enemies and make them hit harder).

TECHNICAL Sadly, the end of the game is unpolished as emotional moments have less impact when the faces were unanimated during scenes when characters were arguing and the character models just have happy smiles and no lip movement. As well there were lines that could have had voice acting for.

CONCLUSION I do recommend the game as a chill one with some nice music and fun transversal, but just go in expecting less from the story.

The game is short, but that's good because it doesn't have a lot going on. The main attraction is the traversal. Surfing along the water, jumping, gliding, grappling between platforms, it all feels fluid and awesome. Perplexingly, there's extremely simple combat that's neither challenging nor interesting; it should've been cut from the game.

But, as I said, the game is short enough that it ended right when I was getting tired from what little there was to do.