Mythic Ocean Review

Game: Mythic Ocean
Genre: Adventure, Other
System: Nintendo Switch (also on Steam. Coming to Playstation 4 and Xbox One)
Developer|Publisher: Paralune | Nakana.io
Age Rating: US E | EU 7+
Price: US $14.99 | UK £12.99 | EU € 14,99
Release Date: July 2, 2021

Review coded used, with many thanks to Nakana.io

Summer is simply a great time to be paddling my way around the salty depths, both at the beach and on the Switch. After my recent swim through the oceanic realm of Subnautica, I dove straight into the seas of Mythic Ocean. Mythic Ocean is the title that most caught my eye in the Wholesome Direct this past E3. What did I think? Let’s take a look!

Story

You are a being who has awoken in a watery world, only to be told that you are here to help choose which god will create the world that is about to be born. You will take a journey to meet these gods and help them make choices that will influence their development. Who will ultimately create the new world? How will it turn out? That depends, in part, on you!

Gameplay

Mythic Ocean is a mix of exploration, the collection of book fragments scattered across the ocean in magical portals, and interactions with both sea creatures and the gods. You’ll also complete little story segments known as fables as you progress through the game.

This title is strongest when you’re interacting with the gods. The choices that must be made are not simple. Do you help the group, at the expense of the individual? Do you deceive someone to get them to stop engaging in behaviours that may be causing harm? These are questions that don’t have easy answers, and they highlight some of the problems of creating a society.

Controls

Unfortunately, this is where things get a little slippery. This game has separate movement and camera controls. The default is sensitive, so I was constantly missing my goals, or having trouble managing to aim the camera where I needed it. I set everything to less sensitive and found a workable combo for me, but it resets to the default when you go into a portal to collect a page. It will go back once you re-enter the ocean, but it is odd and annoying since you have those controls set a certain way for a reason. I was constantly sliding past the pages by accident when the controls were set back.

Art and Music

The music was unremarkable in my opinion. Perfectly pleasant didn’t ever feel the need to mute the game, just not remarkable enough to comment on. But there’s something to be said for setting music that is unremarkable: It means it blends well with the game!

The visuals are beautiful, if somewhat disorienting. Colourful seas and creative creatures, but I felt I couldn’t see far enough into the distance, and I sometimes had trouble discerning up from down. This led to some frustrating navigation moments that just added unnecessary length. I should mention as a disclaimer, that I am not known for navigating 3D worlds particularly well (including, sometimes, reality. My friends will readily tell you I am a klutz!) but this game did seem unusually disorienting in sections.

Issues

The game has a teleport option that allows you to move quickly between the ocean’s realms to talk to the different gods. Unfortunately, the gods are not always where they’re supposed to be. This isn’t a problem per se, but it led to some pretty aimless wandering on my part. There is a neat echolocation feature to help you find things, but even with that it sometimes took me a while to locate the god I needed to interact with to progress the story.

The dialogue selection button was very touchy for some reason. This led to a lot of selection of response options before I even had a chance to read them. Now, this may have been in part because I’m a fast reader, so hitting X rather quickly is part of how I do things, but I’ve never had this problem so frequently in a single game. I found tapping on the screen to advance the dialogue to be the best way to avoid this problem. Sadly, you can’t rewind and select different dialogue, so if you do accidentally select a choice that you’re not happy with, you have to go back to the last save point. Not a huge deal, as it saves every time you enter a new realm, but it should be avoidable.

Conclusion

Mythic Ocean has some interesting things to say about the societies we can build and the ways in which we interact with each other. Unfortunately, I found the journey to those conversations to be unnecessarily drawn out at times by touchy controls and characters I couldn’t find easily. I also found myself a bit bored by some of the random sea creature interactions, even though most of them are clever and quirky.

Despite the issues I had with some of the controls and settings, and the excessive wandering I had to do on occasion, Mythic Ocean has a lot going for it storywise and I really got into helping the gods through their dilemmas and influencing the creation of a new world. My first world didn’t turn out the way I’d hoped, so this game has me hooked for at least one more playthrough, but there will probably be more. A demo is currently available in the Nintendo eShop, so try it out for yourself!

Final Verdict: I Like It