There's a wooliness that pervades the game's mechanics, themes, and story that left me a bit cold, despite the fact that the visuals and music are undeniably excellent.
This game's central conceit doesn't work. Returning water to the land isn't as emotionally clear as returning life to the world was in Okami or Flower. The rolling deserts, which explicitly echo the landscapes in Journey are already beautiful, as are the other landscapes later on. They don't feel like dead worlds in need of saving, so the transformations aren't cathartic. This isn't inherently a problem, but the game doesn't resolve that lack of emotional clarity nor do anything with the tension that results from it; in fact, it seems unaware of it. It treats this return of water as if it were uncomplicatedly good.
The transformations are also undermined by not committing to the concept. The sea life that emerges floats in the air. I wouldn't usually get hung up on this kind of detail in a piece that is so clearly working on the level of visual metaphor. However, if the core of the game involves changing land into sea, it seems very odd for the water to feel meaningless. Beyond letting you move a bit faster on your sword-board, the water is only important because it has a symbolic relationship with the objects in the air. You need the jellyfish to bounce you up there, so you need to return the water. It's tenuous.
Movement feels great and the sense of speed is wonderful but the mechanics are disappointingly shallow. After playing Flower, Journey and Abzu, I had no illusions that this would be a complex or challenging game; the mechanics, just as in the previous games, are a means to convey mood and movement, to facilitate exploration, which they do admirably. But there's a gesture here towards more complexity, tricks to learn, collectible currency, optional score attacks, which makes the absence of challenge or mechanical development more noticeable. It's hard when playing not to imagine a version of this game that might have made some use of the game's wonderful movement and challenged me to get from A to B at speed, for example.
A consequence of this game's movement is that the landscapes are incredibly vast. Combined with the fantastical elements, it means there's so much superficially grand ethereal spectacle, it starts to feel meaningless. The landscapes are so big and abstract, so inhuman, they feel contrived and artificial; by half way, I no longer felt I was exploring real places, but someone's DeviantArt page.
Like the mechanics, the story's half-measure approach means it occupies an awkward place between being pure archetype, like Journey, and actually having a proper story with characters. There are some lore turds to stumble across and a wordless tale of rivalry and friendship that almost looks like it might be something. It descends into cliché by its end, with a boss fight of all things, against an unambiguously nasty critter. Disappointing.
