Between the arrival of cozy video games, farm sims, rhythm video games, narrative adventures, and extra, we’re in one thing of a golden age of non-violent video games. If you wish to take a break from taking pictures and punching and as an alternative simply chill out with some chill vibes, you may have myriad choices accessible to you. Countless Ocean: Luminous is an aquatic take, letting you freely discover the ocean with no hazard or violence to talk of in anyway. It generally straddles the road between sport and edutainment in ways in which might be partaking, however achingly sluggish development and an absence of realism depart it feeling washed up.
Scientists say solely 5% of the ocean has been explored. The title Countless Ocean, and the unexplored nature of the ocean itself, suggests an unbelievable diploma of chance and journey. In follow, although, there really is not all that a lot to do in Countless Ocean: Luminous. You possibly can participate in a Solo Dive, wherein you discover a seemingly randomized map; a Shared Dive, which is only a Solo Dive with buddies exploring the identical map collectively on-line utilizing Nintendo’s Swap On-line service (full with its common shortcomings); and Story Mode, which supplies you quick missions consisting of targets accompanied by a bit of dialogue.
With this dearth of choices, its strategy to development gating additional compounds the dearth of selection. After the primary handful of story missions, the others are locked behind scanning ocean creatures in Shared or Solo dives. To scan you simply maintain the L button within the course of sea life till the meter fills, which then provides an in depth have a look at the creatures in your scan. However the progress gates are set so absurdly excessive that the novelty wears off rapidly. One of many earliest gates is about at 500 scans, which felt excessive however cheap. The following was at 1,000, so I needed to get one other 500. That rubbed me the mistaken method. By the point I reached the following gate, set at 2,000–meaning I wanted one other 1,000 scans–the chill vibes have been gone. I used to be simply aggravated. It is arduous to overstate how irritating it’s to spend nearly an hour roaming round a randomized map scanning fish, solely to exit the map and discover I’ve solely gained one other 200 pips towards my subsequent story objective. Plus, judging by the creature log, there are slightly below 600 species of sea life complete within the sport. Why would you want to scan 2,000 occasions to see a mid-game story mission?
Not that there is a lot story to inform. You are a brand new diver accompanied by an AI companion, exploring phenomena of glowing fish, and generally you are accompanied by a brash (however really cowardly) fellow diver named Daniel. The story missions are quick and largely uneventful. Generally they finish so rapidly that I used to be genuinely shocked. Different occasions, they really feel like a glorified tutorial, which makes it that a lot stranger to gate it behind a lot free-roaming playtime. At the least considered one of them is only a cutscene with no precise diving gameplay in anyway. Often, the story mode will ship one thing sudden and enjoyable, like a large or fantastical species of fish, however these moments are few and much between. There’s a meta-story involving an historical relic with 99 slots, which you fill in by discovering sure artifacts scattered randomly all through dives or by fulfilling achievement targets, nevertheless it feels extra like a busywork guidelines than an actual story-driver.
And since the scanning necessities are so extreme, small inconveniences really feel extra impactful than they need to. It is simple to select up a fish you’ve got already scanned whereas attempting to register a brand new one. Each time you scan any fish, it zooms in on them for a second, forcing you to hit B to again out of the detailed view. If you happen to scan a number of species directly, they’re grouped in an inventory collectively, which is supposed to be a comfort feature–but new species aren’t prioritized within the checklist, so you want to scroll down to seek out any with a “???” designation to mark them as found. If you happen to do not, the unidentified fish stays unidentified. If you happen to scan a big faculty of the identical fish, they will all be listed individually. In Solo Dives, the map is slowly charted in segments as you discover, however keeping track of the map to verify I used to be filling within the little squares meant I might fail to spot a fish swimming by, or I might miss a depth change which will reward me for diving deeper.
Your dives get you expertise factors to stage up, which will increase your dive capability, which you need to use to tag sea creatures to swim alongside you. At first, these solely embody the smallest of sea creatures, however as you construct capability, you may swim with bigger ones which might be used to unravel riddles. A stone pill would possibly problem you to come back again with a selected kind of turtle or a fish that “sails because it swims.” Even then, although, the options are too inflexible. Once I returned to the pill with a “Sailfish,” nothing occurred, presumably as a result of it was not the particular answer the riddle had in thoughts.
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Along with story progress and dive capability, leveling up additionally opens new however severely restricted tiers of customization choices. These embody palette swaps to your diver or particular person SCUBA swimsuit components, totally different stickers to use to your profile, and emotes. There is not even a distinct helmet or mouthpiece, simply the default in numerous colours.
It feels as if the objective was to create a digital, interactive aquatic museum, and the number of sea life does help this properly. It really is thrilling the primary time you see a brand new species of sea turtle or an extinct megalodon shark, even when you already know that it may’t damage you. However the mechanical underpinnings get in the best way of its potential as a museum too. For instance, each species of fish has a blurb with some fascinating marine info, full with a studying of it out of your AI companion. This might be a cool and academic function, however whenever you’re pressed to carry out 1000’s of scans, it is arduous to trouble listening to each blurb. There additionally is not an indicator for whenever you’ve already heard a blurb, and since you may see species repeated so much, it is practically unattainable to recollect which of them you may have or have not heard–even for those who can inform dozens of roughly similar-looking fish aside, which I am unable to.
Partly because of its non-violent nature, Countless Ocean doesn’t current the depths very realistically, even to my layman’s eyes. Your oxygen is limitless, and also you need not fear about temperature or depth. You may by no means freeze or get decompression illness or drown. Extra aggressive species won’t ever assault you. Species of fish appear to be scattered kind of randomly across the map, which results in oddities like discovering large-scale creatures in shallow waters, or discovering deep-sea dwellers in middle-depths as an alternative of the deepest, nearly pitch-black components of the ocean the place they really reside. And whereas that is seemingly a limitation of the Swap {hardware}, the fish, coral, and ocean flooring themselves aren’t rendered photorealistically sufficient to instill a way of awe and majesty.
It appears Countless Ocean needs you to spend most of your time diving with buddies to cross the time. The Shared Dives possibility is the primary one on the menu, in any case, and it’s simpler to satisfy the straightforward procedural targets whenever you’re paired with different divers. However like most Swap video games, you be part of pleasant video games utilizing a digital code, and there is not built-in voice chat, so you may’t actually deal with it like an underwater digital foyer. Even for those who might, although, scanning fish with your mates wouldn’t maintain the group enjoyable for anybody however essentially the most devoted of sea-life lovers.
Countless Ocean: Luminous might have been a sensible SCUBA sim with all of the treacherous hazards that actual underwater divers want to think about, a soothing chill-vibes sport that is principally about discovering fish with your mates, or a story-driven sport centered round discovering superior and even extinct underwater beasts. It has items of all of these, nevertheless it does not decide to any of them. As an alternative, it takes the enormity and glory of earth’s largest and most mysterious area and turns exploring it right into a uninteresting, repetitive chore.