Owlboy

Owlboy is a game with wonderful visuals and music that took a long time to make that is utterly mediocre and not really worth your time.

(Note: this review does contain slight spoilers)

Let’s talk about the positives.

• The visuals are fantastic. Some real top notch pixel art. Save for some questionable art direction (ie the red flash from the shotgun attack, lack of some button UI), the art is some of the best modern pixel art you’ll ever see. Characters are detailed and full of expression. Background are beautiful and have a real sense of depth.

• The music is wonderful. It’s pretty typical video game-y adventure music, but it’s well orchestrated and there wasn’t a single track that felt was overly repetitive or annoying.

• The writing; aka the plot, dialogue, flavor text, is all serviceable and generally inoffensive. There are some genuinely touching moments and a decent little plot twist. However the ending feels like a non-ending that essentially amounts to generic time-travel related trope that we’ve seen done better in games. The character’s motivation towards the end of the game are forced and it, excuse the pun, it doesn’t land on its feet.

Unfortunately the gameplay is the weakest part of this game. This game is riddled with a lack of polish that prevents it from having a good feel to it.

You cannot remap the buttons for either gamepad or keyboard/mouse (I highly recommend you never attempt to play this game using keyboard/mouse as those controls are inexcusably awful.) The level design often demands a level of precision that the controls do not allow for. Example: You roll with the B (Circle), but aim with the Right Stick. Sometimes you’ll need to roll to avoid an attack while aiming, but can’t remove your thumb from the right stick fast enough.

There are stealth sections that are either tedious or outright terrible. These are often poor with sensible checkpoints and any small screw up results in near instant failure. There are at least 3 of these throughout the game with the last one being essentially a whole dungeon. At least you can fly in that last one.

The main gimmick of this game is that the player can fly. It’s not an original idea by any means. Games like Aquaria, Insanely Twisted Shadow Planet, and others have done similar things, but it’s still uncommon enough to be novel. However there are multiple points in this game where they take away the one unique thing about it and the results vary.

The waterfall sections feel fine. In them you can only jump. The jump is super floaty unlike most other games and takes while to get used to, but those sections are usually very short. A single room or a bit more. You can’t attack other than the little spin attack that does no damage, but combat is usually avoidable or nonexistent in those sections. They’re actually nicely done.

It’s the other times that are extremely questionable. There’s an early stealth section that’s pretty bad but the worst offender is the last area. There you can only fly for a little bit during it. Doing so will cancel all vertical momentum and slow you considerable. This would be fine if flying wasn’t so easy to trigger accidentally. By simply tapping up or jump again while in the air you’ll start flying. For most of the game this is great. You can just hold up and fly around. It feels expected, especially when using the analog stick. However, in that last section, if you start flying when you don’t expect to you’ll likely fall into an instant death trap. This causes you to countlessly restart what should be an fairly straightforward platforming section not because of your own inability, but due to unexpected control issues. It felt like an awful Mario Maker level.

This sort of one-off mechanic that doesn’t quite feel right or is straight up bad is very common throughout the game. There’s a dungeon where everything is dark and you only have a very small radius of light. You have to navigate tight tunnels edged with spikes, but the controls are floaty and the spikes too easy to clip into. Often it doesn’t look like you should have hit them. Later on you’re riding a giant lava snake and moving it up and down to avoid obstacles, but the screen is constantly rotating and it just feels wonky and awful instead of super cool like it should have. There’s not a single area of this game where I could say “Man! That was a really well done and fun!”

Combat in this game is, like so much else, lackluster. It’s boring, slow, and often times unavoidable since enemies will chase you until you’re dead. Boss battles are much the same (expect for the final boss which is actually pretty well done! Though they do make you do it three times). Typical bosses have either a safe area (generally towards the top of the screen) or a simple strategy that makes them a complete non-issue.

Ultimately, I feel like the developers would have better spent their time making a bunch of small games instead of trying to prefect this game. They did not succeed. So much of its issues scream inexperience and stubbornness. Had this game come out a year or two after they had started working on it, it would have been a flawed but alright game that they could have built from. As it stands now, it’s a flawed game that does not live up to expectations. If you want to play game with beautiful pixel art that took 8+ years to make then go play AM2R instead. Owlboy is just not worth your time.