I remember when Portal came out and first person adventure/puzzle games exploded and there were so many interesting takes on the subgenre. Some evolved the traditional Myst-like gameplay, some started mixing mechanics and ideas from other genres, some played with physics objects a lot… But for the past 5 or so years, I’ve been mostly ignoring these types of games. There are way too many of them and yet, vast majority of the games seems to fall into two main types: either story driven games with almost pointless adventure elements slapped on top or incredibly complicated puzzle games that make Myst look like an obvious and easy game for children.
Call of the Sea got my attention because it seemed like it could be at least slightly more engaging than a typical “slapped on top” type of adventure. And for the first hour or two, that’s almost what it was. But then it turned into one of the most tedious and poorly designed first person adventure games I’ve played in a while.
The game plays like one would expect from the genre – you explore locations from the first person perspective to find clues and solve puzzles to progress, while a story unfolds. In case of Call of the Sea, the story takes the Cthulhu mythos as a basis for the plot and something Jules Verne-inspired for the mood. This mix is somewhat surprising and doesn’t seem to quite work. There are countless moments that seem to aim at building tension and being scary, but they’re not. And at the same time, the game often portrays itself as something wonderous and exciting during the most dry and uneventful sections. None of this is helped by the fact that whomever wrote the script seemed to believe that main characters can’t stay silent for longer than half a minute, so our main heroine explodes into infinite trite monologues every couple of steps you take in the game.
Maybe it wouldn’t be as jarring if the story itself was any good, but it’s just uninteresting, despite starting out with a promise. And the final 10 minutes of the game include a… “plot twist”? I guess? I mean, imagine if you were reading a book about a character named Harry and then the final 15 pages of the story decided to shock you, with countless explanations and flashbacks to earlier scenes, that the character name is actually Henry. Even though that changes absolutely nothing about the story or the character or anything at all. It’s baffling and feels like a result of designing an interactive ending first and then writing a story that needed to lead up to the ending but didn’t.
Yet, even though it is a story driven adventure, it could still work as an adventure/puzzle title set in really pretty looking levels. But even here things start at inoffensive and end up tedious and annoying. First half of the game is full of puzzles that you solve without much thinking, while appreciating that these puzzles exist, as simple as they are. But later the game essentially switches all puzzles to horribly tedious busywork tasks, where you see the puzzle, understand the puzzle solution, but have to run around for 15 minutes and collect the puzzle pieces so you could finally move on. Then a really complex but exciting sounding puzzle, where it turns out you just need to do what the game shows you. Then you get an even bigger location where the puzzle is “press buttons”. Then poorly designed Simon Says. Then the exactly same timing puzzle repeated several times. Then another incredibly primitive puzzle, except you need to run around another large level each time you complete one section of it simply to unlock another section. All while the main character continues with her pointless introspection.
While playing the first half of the game I thought that it will end up being the “eh, I guess it’s pretty and you can check it out on sale, then forget about it” type of game. But then the later half of the game happened and even though apparently it lasted for about 2 hours, to me it felt like 6 and I started hating my time with the game more and more as it went on. So, yes, it is pretty, but no, I won’t recommend playing it even if you see it on sale. There are countless far better games that have more respect for player time and either have stories that are far better written, or stories that you can safely ignore without them getting in the way.