Ocean's Heart Official Announcement Trailer

like on paper this should be EXACTLY my kind of game

but theres so many little flaws in the moment-to-moment experience that it just grates on me constantly. unrelentingly.

i got it on sale for like $9 so i feel bad being TOO mean to it but

theres no aspect of this game that doesnt just feel like a worse version of the games it's inspired by

the fact that it's a pixel game with no option for pixel perfect scaling so it's got that weird squashy-stretchy look pixel art gets when it's not displayed at the right resolution

the way the dialogue is all written in this weird quippy stream-of-consciousness style and EVERY CHARACTER TALKS THIS WAY it's EXHAUSTING

the way they're hell-bent on cramming as much text into each text box as they can fit, to the point of frequently splitting a single sentence across multiple boxes, making the writing feel fractured and disjointed

the fact that dying resets your progress in a room but your consumed items stay consumed

and, notably, consumable items are the ONLY way to recover your health without going back to town-- there is no direct equivalent to hearts from enemies/grass/pots/etc

instead it does the breath of the wild thing where you gotta pause the game to open your menu and shove food into your face to recover hearts, which, whether you did or did not like that mechanic, i think we can agree it did weird things to the moment-to-moment pacing of that game

visually it's trying to be like, minish cap with a dash of wind waker, but it's like a bargain bin version of both of those things with nothing to really make it stand out

the very first scene starts with a character walking diagonally, but there are no diagonal walksprites in this game, so your introduction to what character animation looks like in this game is a character kind of sliding unnaturally to one side. it does not really improve from there

the audio design is kinda sauceless. i have not come up with a better word to describe what i feel when i listen to it

or, i suppose, what i don't feel

i wanted to like this game so bad

but i don't

and that makes me sad

a game has to be bad in a specific way for me to really hate or not want to play it so I can kinda get what you mean about being forgiving. but also dang that really is just a whole ton of microannoyances that really add up

this is probably what it takes for me. i cant really talk about the higher-level structural or tonal problems with a thing cause that stuff tends to just slide right off me. or if it does bother me then i tend not to be able to articulate what the problem is without someone else putting words to it. and then it feels like someone else's opinion and not mine

and i guess a lot of stuff i really REALLY wont like, a lot of times i can kinda tell i wont like it, so i won't play/watch/read/whatever in the first place

whereas this looks like a lot of stuff i DO like, but misses the mark in a lot of small ways that i find relatively easy to articulate