[8.22.2025]
Completion: 100% (32/32 achievements)
Played on Steam Deck
I finished this last night at around 17 hours. Some of that is idle time and some of it is because I was playing while watching a show most of the time, so it's probably doable in 10-12, or less if you don't start off exploring and ignoring tasks like I tend to.
When I first started it, I was pretty thoroughly enthralled. My first impression of the music, the art, and the concept were all good, and I liked that it had a similar charm to Röki without just being the same game. But then it got really repetitive, and there are no puzzles--just a lot of running back and forth looking for mementos across the island. By the time I was halfway through, I was really wishing that it WAS Röki but with Greek mythology instead of Scandinavian.
The gameplay loop just ended up being exhausting. Even though I was excited each time I unlocked a new part of the island or met a new character, the tasks that you have to complete for said characters were the same thing over and over. There are eight god characters, each has three levels of friendship, and they have a specific task for you to complete a certain amount of times per level, as well as finding mementos around the island to help restore their memories. To explain this a bit more clearly:
You meet Hermes first. He wants you to feed the gulls around the island, so he gives you some dates. You can feed like 4-5 before running out of food, and that maxes the friendship bar for that level. To the right of the friendship bar is a heart with the current friendship level. To the right of that will be 1-3 silhouettes of a present with a question mark over it. Once you've found the appropriate number of mementos that belong to that character, they'll get bits of memory back and your friendship level will go up. You then do the exact same thing over again--a new food for the gulls, find more mementos. For the first half of the game, you can't really do anything out of order or focus on multiple characters, because you don't have access to some parts of the island until you get these golden seals (like medallions, not the animal) to unlock gates, and you can only get those seals by being able to enter a character's house once you've leveled up their friendship once.
The gates themselves are found in a few different spots around the island, and you need the correct seals to open them. Doing so is the closest thing to a "puzzle" that you get with this game. After placing the seals, you have to turn a handful of concentric circles to match up the lines on them. This takes no brain power, though, because you really are just turning each one individually and not solving anything. It's not one of those puzzles where turning one circle turns two others in different directions.
So rinse and repeat this a bunch of times. The character tasks range from refilling fountains, to using an Un-Hammer to fix wind turbines, to using a lightning bolt to restore power to string lights. You run back and forth a million times because you're finding mementos (via radar, not having to do any real searching on your own) for characters and completing their tasks. With essentially 24 friendship levels' worth of this, it got old super fast.
There are ambrosia bushes growing all over the island. You collect these to use as currency for trading with the gods, and they grow back like every two days (yes, there is a day/night cycle but you never have to sleep or anything). Hermes trades you for keys to unlock doors that are found around the island, and are used for fast travel. They all take you back to a central hub of doors near your home base lighthouse. Someone else trades for cassette tapes, which you can play at any of the numerous rest spots found on the island, and yet another character trades for "random junk that washed up," which can be either decor or mementos. So, some of the trades are just for fun, some enhance your gameplay, and some are actually necessary to get through the game.
As you explore, you will sometimes find crates washed up on shore. These contain decorative items for your lighthouse. They're placed automatically when you go to the lighthouse, so there's not an actual "decorate your space!" element, unfortunately.
The story is okay. Your character Alex was shipwrecked on the island and is trying to help all of the gods living there recover their memories and figure out why they're so distrustful of one another now. The characters are overall pretty true to the lore in the sense that Hermes is a messenger, Aphrodite makes love matches, etc., but some liberties were taken with what makes these characters "gods" and the design choices are most definitely not classic interpretations. I liked Hades' and Poseidon's designs the most.
There are some other collectibles, like scraps of journal entries from some previous castaway, and stories about the gods that you unlock via one of the character's tasks. I do really like that sort of thing.
In short, I think the game looks great and has a solid premise, but I would have liked actual puzzles instead of hours upon hours of running back and forth doing the same thing over and over and over. If the team was trying to do something "different" from Röki, they accomplished that, but it wasn't for the better.
