You know what saddens me the most? It's that the developers cared about this game. Yet this game is shrouded in unbelievable amounts of bad design decisions that I can't wrap my head around it. Want to see what I mean for yourself? As an experiment buy this game, progress enough and get to the cannon minigame: it is so bad that it deserves to be studied by itself. Yet it's not an isolated incident but rather an encapsulation of everything this game fails to deliver.

So this is a game that was 10 years in the making, with gorgeous visuals, no doubt about it. Apart from visuals, what does it bring to the table? It can be likened to run-and-gun levels of Cuphead (as opposed to boss sections of it) which tries and fails to tell a captivating story. Where and how does it fail? Because it's a story of heroics-gone-wrong, with little player agency. It's like storyteller is shouting at us, knowing in full that we can't resort back: "Why? What did we wrong? Tell me, help me improve!" But no, you will succeed in failing: that's the only thing game allows you to do. Don't get me wrong, I'm not particularly against failure or good-deed-gone-wrong, but here it's at a complete odd with the scenery. It's pastel, colorful, cheerful, playful. Even the "big bad"s are beaked robots calling themselves pirates. Completely impossible to instill a sense of seriousness, apart from all the loss we're dealt. For player growth through failure there needs to be a more somber tone than this game provides.

Also gameplay is incredibly frustrating. How did developers agreed to implement them I'll never know but I can guess: spending 10 years on any is a surefire way to get tunnel visioned: your bad ideas don't appear bad anymore, after all those are the only ideas around. And you learn to walk around problems they present because you've been dealing with them from day 1. So all in all this might have been the only game they knew, so there was no problem in shipping it like this because they couldn't imagine any other Owlboy anymore.

What do I mean by frustrating? I told player agency being limited from a narrative standpoint: This holds true from gameplay side too. You don't shoot, you carry teammates that shoot for you (you do the aiming, so it's not automatic) which shouldn't be too different from otherwise but it is: Whenever you take damage you drop your gun, so you need to reequip it while trying to dodge tons of enemies swarming you. Enemies swarm you and most have the same colour palette as you do, therefore making it almost impossible to distinguish who is who in the midst of chaos. Further, levels are large and displayed in limited portions with transitions being abrupt and discontinuous. When you get exit the screen from left you enter the next one from right though since level is loaded there will be active enemies that will damage you making you unable to fight back and make you not distinguish who's who. I can't begin to express how frustrating that was. (Solution: keep your character fixed and let environment roll around you a la Cave Story. Was is impossible in this game's context? Not my problem!)
Another thing: this game can't decide if it wants to be action packed or tactical. Movement is slow, there are cooldowns, enemies are not very energetic, but on occasion you'll need to mash buttons or move quickly. Why? What do you want me to do, game?!

I may finish the game, I may not, but either way don't buy into the hype that was gorgeous visuals. Watch some in-depth gameplay first.

You know what saddens me the most? It's that the developers [i]cared[/i] about this game. Yet this game is shrouded in unbelievable amounts of bad design decisions that I can't wrap my head around it. Want to see what I mean for yourself? As an experiment buy this game, progress enough and get to the cannon minigame: it is so bad that it deserves to be studied by itself. Yet it's not an isolated incident but rather an encapsulation of everything this game fails to deliver. So this is a game that was 10 years in the making, with [b]gorgeous[/b] visuals, no doubt about it. Apart from visuals, what does it bring to the table? It can be likened to run-and-gun levels of Cuphead (as opposed to boss sections of it) which tries and fails to tell a captivating story. Where and how does it fail? Because it's a story of heroics-gone-wrong, with little player agency. It's like storyteller is shouting at us, knowing in full that we can't resort back: "Why? What did we wrong? Tell me, help me improve!" But no, you will succeed in failing: that's the only thing game allows you to do. Don't get me wrong, I'm not particularly against failure or good-deed-gone-wrong, but here it's at a complete odd with the scenery. It's pastel, colorful, cheerful, playful. Even the "big bad"s are beaked robots calling themselves pirates. Completely impossible to instill a sense of seriousness, apart from all the loss we're dealt. For player growth through failure there needs to be a more somber tone than this game provides. Also gameplay is incredibly frustrating. How did developers agreed to implement them I'll never know but I can guess: spending 10 years on [i]any[/i] is a surefire way to get tunnel visioned: your bad ideas don't appear bad anymore, after all those are the only ideas around. And you learn to walk around problems they present because you've been dealing with them from day 1. So all in all this might have been the only game they knew, so there was no problem in shipping it like this because they couldn't imagine any other Owlboy anymore. What do I mean by frustrating? I told player agency being limited from a narrative standpoint: This holds true from gameplay side too. You don't shoot, you carry teammates that shoot for you (you do the aiming, so it's not automatic) which shouldn't be too different from otherwise but it is: Whenever you take damage you drop your gun, so you need to reequip it while trying to dodge tons of enemies swarming you. Enemies swarm you and most have the same colour palette as you do, therefore making it almost impossible to distinguish who is who in the midst of chaos. Further, levels are large and displayed in limited portions with transitions being abrupt and discontinuous. When you get exit the screen from left you enter the next one from right though since level is loaded there will be active enemies that will damage you making you unable to fight back and make you not distinguish who's who. I can't begin to express how frustrating that was. (Solution: keep your character fixed and let environment roll around you a la Cave Story. Was is impossible in this game's context? Not my problem!) Another thing: this game can't decide if it wants to be action packed or tactical. Movement is slow, there are cooldowns, enemies are not very energetic, but on occasion you'll need to mash buttons or move quickly. Why? What do you want me to do, game?! I may finish the game, I may not, but either way don't buy into the hype that was gorgeous visuals. Watch some in-depth gameplay first.