Video Game Review: Ocean’s Heart

Ocean’s Heart

Steam

Nordcurrent & Max Mraz

Top-Down Action-Adventure

Ocean’s Heart is, according to publisher Nordcurrent’s PR communications, inspired by The Legend of Zelda meets Hollow Knight with a cute girl as the main character. Naturally, when I saw the description for the game, I was immediately on board. Players assume the role of Tilia, a young soldier in training whose quest is to track down her father and best friend six months after a pirate attack on her home village, doing all sorts of odd jobs and slaying all sorts of monsters along the way. The adventure takes her through a series of dungeons, complete with major dungeon items, boss fights, and health increases at the end of them, all of which serve to open up her ability to explore the world as she gets them. Fairly standard Zelda-inspired stuff, and certainly welcome considering how satisfying that gameplay loop can be.

Upon booting up the game, I was immediately struck by how like The Minish Cap the game is graphically in terms of both its aesthetic and some of the animations, such as for rolling or going up/down stairs. Though the game clearly intends to evoke this comparison, it does so to its own detriment, as it only makes the more lackluster aspects of the game’s presentation that much more apparent. Many of the animations and sound effects feel oddly weightless, especially when it comes to explosions and hits in combat, and the hitboxes for those things are a bit weird as well. Similarly, there are a number of blacksmiths scattered around the game world who can upgrade Tilia’s gear, but they feel oddly… hollow due to the fact that their idle metalworking animation doesn’t come with any sort of clanging sound effect to really place them in the world. The last really big issue I had with Ocean Heart’s presentation was the NPC sprites scattered throughout towns; though they’re fine on the design level, you’ll see them get re-used a lot, which is certainly to be expected of games to an extent but I would assert that this game could’ve benefited from having even just a couple more.

I want to be clear that the minor-but-numerous flaws I encountered playing Ocean’s Heart were worth persevering through because it is still very much enjoyable to run around slaying monsters and collecting items, even if there’s a definite sense that it could have been more so with a bit more polish to its rough edges. The music is catchy and good at setting the mood for each area, to the point where I genuinely got very different feelings from exploring a watery lotus grove than I did exploring a swamp filled with tall grass. Even when an area’s background track is a bit less engaging it’s still genuinely fun to run around new areas figuring out what the layout is like. In this way, I can definitely see why the developer invoked the Hollow Knight comparison: the areas aren’t actually that big when you get down to it, but they do a good job of feeling like they are as you’re first wandering. This is helped by the lack of detailed maps, even for dungeons, which is actually a good design choice in this instance and helps to effectively draw gameplay out a bit but in a way that oddly doesn’t feel like artificial lengthening.

One point in Ocean’s Heart’s favor over older Zelda games is that there’s a quest log, so you never have to worry about getting an item or doing something a rando NPC asked you to do and being like “was there someone I needed to go back and talk to about that again?” This is good because there are quite a few side quests that can divert your attention from the main adventure, almost all of which are just plain fun to watch play out. Nearly every bit of dialogue in the game is suffused with dry, self-aware humor in a way that manages not to be exhausting because there’s still a sort of earnestness to it at the same time. I say “nearly” because later game plot beats turn to a more sober and surprisingly mature tone, particularly in Tilia’s interactions with Hazel, the best friend she sets out to rescue. In this way the story serves as a surprisingly effective coming-of-age tale, and the charm of the entire game is enhanced by the contrast.

One final note I will make (pre-conclusion, anyway) is that items in the player’s inventory have no description for what they do, forcing you to remember exactly what they do from the text box the first time you pick one up. This is especially a problem if you happen to craft an item before finding one in the wild, in which case you get no description at all. I append this here rather than putting it in one of the other paragraphs because it seems like something that would be fairly simple to fix in a patch where the developers so inclined, but it is still a bit of an annoyance.

Despite the fun I had with Ocean’s Heart, the fact remains that there are quite a few issues throughout the game. They’re all fairly minor, and thus only add up enough to bring it down to being okay rather than outright bad, but it also makes me wonder what could have been with a bit more polish. Still, if you’re like me and are always chasing the high of Zelda-style games (especially ones that let you play as a girl, Nintendo) then Ocean’s Heart is worth picking up.