![]() The puzzle clues hidden throughout these environments are often scattered around. There are moments when a monolithic temple with a large stone doorway leads you into an ominous room with a bloody handprint that serves as the beginning of another scavenger hunt. While the marketing for the game does a good job of flaunting the Pacific flora and waterfalls, it's the later chapters that lean heavily into the title's Lovecraftian roots that impressed me most. That was an isolated moment and isn't indicative of the rest of the puzzles.įrom a visual perspective, Call of the Sea has moments of brilliance due mainly to its strong art direction. Instead, my solution felt like a half-baked recipe of sheer luck and perseverance leading to a moment of dumbfounded shrugs when the locked door finally opened. One puzzle left me stumped for over an hour, but the resulting payoff was anything but celebratory. Piecing together those clues is often fun and satisfying in its own right, but you'll rarely have "Eureka!" moments where you feel like the smartest person on the planet. This isn't the next Portal or The Witness most puzzles will only trip you up for 5-10 minutes and can easily be solved through sheer observation of the clues scattered around the environment. The puzzles you encounter along the way also straddle the line of complexity to maintain your interest without hampering the pace of the narrative. The tale is paced well, constantly reeling in the player to truths about the island and its connections with Norah's disease. Just as you're starting to come to grips with the island and events, a new revelation in the story sinks its hooks into you. While the writing is not without its faults - a person who's stranded on a cursed island with a husband who's gone missing for three months is far too calm about the entire ordeal - it does enough to keep you engaged from start to finish. With little in the way of story beyond journal entries and monologues from a lone protagonist, Cissy Jones' performance as Norah keeps the player's attention through the entirety of the game's narrative. The game's continual delve toward the obscure and unknown is key to its success. Disjointed lines must align to form celestial bodies. The musical notes of a mountain-sized organ must be adjusted to match the phases of the moon. As you go deeper into the island, the puzzles' evolving complexity stays in stride with the increasingly otherworldly oddities in the game world. Clues etched across signposts hidden throughout the overgrowth help you decipher the position of dials to lower a drawbridge. A drawing on a piece of paper indicates the location of a hidden item that's needed to open a locked gate. The normalcy of the island pairs well with the rudimentary puzzles that you've come to expect in the early hours of an adventure game. Artifacts, primitive huts, and lever-controlled wooden gates populate the island's well-worn paths, but nothing seems out of place from what you'd expect on a long-forgotten island. The opening chapters have you exploring the lush environments of the island, which has been deemed "cursed" by the locals. With little to go on other than a mysterious package and its contents - a key, a strange Polynesian artifact, and a note that requests her presence off the coast of Tahiti - the game's seven-hour journey begins. You start the game on a boat that nears an island just off the coast of Tahiti, which was the last known location of her missing husband. Set in the 1930s, Call of the Sea casts the player as the sickly Norah Everheart, a wife in search of her missing husband, who had set out to find a cure for her unknown affliction. Despite some technical pain points and the occasional lackluster puzzle, Call of the Sea is an enchanting adventure title with alluring environments and strong performances that drive the captivating narrative. ![]() The protagonist is voiced by Cissy Jones, the same voice actor known for her outstanding work in 2016's Firewatch, which is another clear inspiration for the developers. With environments that delve into otherworldly oddities, there's clear admiration for Lovecraftian lore. ![]() Out of the Blue Games, a newly founded studio in Madrid, Spain, is clear about its inspiration in its debut first-person adventure game, Call of the Sea. ![]()
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