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Genre: Adventure Developer & Publisher: Mateusz Skutnik Released: November 11, 2021 Requirements: OS: Windows 7 or higher Processor: Intel compatible dual core processor Memory: Minimum 4 GB RAM; Recommended, 8 GB RAM Graphics: DirectX 11 compatible card Storage: 2 GB available space
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By flotsam Mateusz Skutnik Having just finished a rather taxing puzzle-fest, I was looking for something a bit different and more relaxing (brain-power wise). A whimsical visually enchanting journey with a piece of seaweed sounded just the thing. Plus, I have wanted to dip into the games of this maker by starting with his first. So it was an apparently obvious choice. It turned out to be an excellent choice, albeit the brain didn’t get much of a rest! Played in the third person, you are Seaweed, who for some reason has put on a mechanical walking suit and is roaming the dusty, desolate, nothing-like-the-ocean world beyond the shoreline. There is nothing for it but to start walking, and see where this quest leads. Visually it is captivating. Hand drawn with ink on paper, the well over 100 separate screens are chock full of surrealistic oddness. Creatures and objects float by or just hang in the sky, gremlin-like creatures can be found in all sorts of places, and Dali-esque “people" wander about ignoring you completely. Things scuttle, but many just go about whatever their business is languidly and deliberately. There is an obvious entropy everywhere, the trains and ships sitting stagnantly dilapidated upon the sand. There are broken things and the bones of dead things later on. The Town seems more alive, but it’s a comparative thing. There is though power to restore, things to activate and to interact with, switches and levers to be pulled and pushed and numerous doors to open. Plus plenty of items to find to help you do all that and even some things to jump on. The important things to jump on are fairly obvious, but jumping can also be involved in changing ‘planes.’ Seaweed moves primarily in the horizontal plane via the A and D keys, moving left and right, but within that plane a jump might mean he/she now walks up the hill instead of continuing along in front of it. A jump might also be used to get him to enter a train door rather than just walking past it; position him in front of the doorway and jump him up to its opening, then head him inside with the W key. You only need to do this if the doorway is not level with the ground (such doorways are just entered using the W key), but it's worth knowing about. There are often paths out of a scene which again are accessed with the W key. Seaweed will walk ‘north’ (i.e., away from you) and the screen will change. These paths are marked so you shouldn’t have trouble identifying when Seaweed can do something other than simply exit a screen left or right, but be alert nonetheless. While you move with the keyboard (Spacebar does the jumping), you explore and interact with the world via the mouse. The default curser is an old-fashioned pen nib, and it will change in response to hotspots. You can’t reveal those so explore carefully; it’s a mighty big world and finding the item you missed or the device you didn’t turn on can take some doing. Indeed, there are a few puzzles that randomise each time you play and which if you haven’t physically interacted with the relevant clue with your mouse, you can’t activate that part of the puzzle. There might for instance be a puzzle with, let’s say, four moving parts that need to be set correctly. You will need to identify the relevant clue for each of the respective parts in order to be able to interact with that part. This prevents any trial and error – the puzzle simply won’t let you – so paying meticulous attention is essential. Which it is in many games, so nothing too different here. What is different and rather interesting is that within a scene you generally don’t have to be physically near a hotspot to interact with it. If you can see it, chances are you can use it, so e.g., you don’t need to get Seaweed up to the mezzanine above in order to be able to examine the chest of drawers. You might even be able to unlock doors Seaweed is prevented from reaching by some barrier, allowing him to then enter the room from the outside. And if the power goes off when you step off the big button, meaning that when you reach the door the lever won’t work, just stay where you are and pull the lever from there - I confess more than once to failing that aspect! Seaweed is a driven sort of character, with a jaunty step and a boundless enthusiasm for moving on. More than once I was buoyed by his cheerful demeanour to keep pressing on. His boundless energy was infectious, and I didn’t want to let him down. It was good that he was like that, because as intimated there is a lot to do and a very big world to do it in. Many of the puzzles involve inventory items, and Seaweed will gather quite a few. There are other things he can gather as well (shells, coins) which provide an additional bit of ‘treasure’ hunting should you be so inclined. Right click brings up the inventory, and then left click to try to deploy it. Some items (codes etc.) can be examined within the inventory in the same way. I didn’t ever combine items, but two were used together in solving one puzzle. Often the puzzle involves sorting out what is required. Experimentation is recommended. On occasions I did things that resulted in other things that made no sense yet, but which I filed away for future use. There are times you will have to pull together information gathered from widely disparate locations, the connective tissue being present if you can piece it together. Indeed, while there were times when I was stuck, and other times when I wondered where on earth to go next. In retrospect I reckon there were only a few puzzles where the intuitive nature of the solution still eludes me. For the rest, diligent attention and thinking about what you have seen and done means you should be able to join the dots. Which doesn’t mean it is easy, just that the game does (generally) provide. That said, it does have the capacity to be unforgiving if you missed something. There are a couple of puzzles where timing is required, and you do need to jump on things. It isn’t at all actiony but I thought it needed mentioning. And if you jump Seaweed somewhere terrible (e.g., into a void) he just reappears from whence he leapt. Needless to say you will make notes, draw pictures, record things you saw, maybe even draw maps. You will note that certain sorts of things are present in this part of the world, proximity to these things will turn them on, those other things need something else to be activated. You will write down symbols and where you saw them, and then link them to other places you also saw them. It’s a rich tapestry. You should certainly understand your teleportation devices. Very helpfully, given the size of the world, there are teleportation beacons you can activate as you go, allowing you to pop back to the location of any of them from any other of them. Clicking one opens the portal interface, where you can choose which you wish to travel to. Each of them is identified by a symbol and a small line drawing of where it is located, but I found my own notes about where each of them was, and more importantly what they were in proximity to, more helpful. However a wrong choice – “I didn’t mean to be here” – is easily remedied by activating and then choosing a different beacon. Quite late in the game you will also come to possess a teleportation rune, which means you can access the network just by clicking on the rune in your inventory (as opposed to having to make your way back to a beacon). Rest assured you will use the system, not just because you missed something, but by design. Some puzzles have pieces many screens apart, both in time and space, particularly a few towards the end. Whilst manually backtracking Seaweed is possible, it is certainly less than desirable. Having finished, I am not sure I am any the wiser as to Seaweed’s mission, but it didn’t matter. The vagueness is in keeping with its surrealistic tones, and enhances them to a certain degree. Ditto the fact that there is no spoken word, and very little written word, and that while there are very effective sound effects, the dreamy soundtrack drapes everything in just the right amount of uncertainty. The game saves automatically upon exit, which is the only save you can make. However, the first game I started only ever had one save (later ones overwrote the earlier ones) whereas the second time I started, each time I exited created a new save point. Maybe I inadvertently turned something on, or maybe it was just part of Seaweed’s grander weirdness. A single save point doesn’t bother me, but you might want to get to the bottom of it if you feel differently. I spent about 12 hours with Seaweed all up, and it was an excellent time. I look forward to moving on to other games by this maker. I played on: OS: Windows 11, 64 Bit Processor: Intel i7-9700K 3.7GHz RAM: Corsair Dominator Platinum RGB DDR4 32GB Video card: AMD Radeon RX 580 8192MB
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