![]() ![]() She makes a deal with the evil sea witch, Ursula, which gives her a chance to experience life on land but ultimately places her life – and her father’s crown – in jeopardy. The youngest of King Triton’s daughters and the most defiant, Ariel longs to find out more about the world beyond the sea and, while visiting the surface, falls for the dashing Prince Eric. While mermaids are forbidden to interact with humans, Ariel must follow her heart. “The Little Mermaid” is the beloved story of Ariel, a beautiful and spirited young mermaid with a thirst for adventure. There are some enjoyable, even magical moments, in Sea of Solitude but they’re mixed in with some mediocrity that make it just a decent experience rather than sublime one. It felt like it ran out of things to offer me long before it ended. While not a long game, by the end of Sea of Solitude I just wanted things to be done. The story was compelling enough that I wanted to see it through to the end, but the repetitive tasks within it lost their charm in the first half. It’s beautiful to look at, but it ends up being a lovely splash in a shallow pond. Sea of Solitude’s potential is never fully realized. ![]() Towards the end of the four- to six-hour story, there’s a slight variation on how you clear corruptions where you have to work with NPCs to reach some swarms that are otherwise inaccessible, but this quickly becomes a boring back-and-forth. That’s fun for a time, but unfortunately it never really changes in interesting ways as you play, eventually getting overly repetitive. The school chapter also establishes that gameplay loop of meeting a monster, getting to know their problems, and then getting rid of corruptions until they’re human again very early on. There’s no real point to it, no story reason for doing so, and it seems unnecessarily rude to the seagulls. You just have to find seagulls and shoo them away. The other collectible you can track down is, by comparison, a snooze. ![]() Plus exploring and enjoying the lovely environments was one of the best parts of Sea of Solitude. While these are optional to the main campaign, going out of my way to get them was a great way to add an extra challenge. They serve as both a fun thing to hunt for and an interesting and eerie reminder that others have been here before. Scattered throughout the world are different collectibles to find, the best of which are the messages in bottles. The voice acting didn’t help in this regard because the larger than life cadence of the monsters often made things feel like an overacted stage play rather than a series of real conversations. Intense screams and overuse of exclamations such as “leave me alone!” felt overly dramatic and consistently took me out of the story. If that was me, I would be asking for the bill early. It’s a shame that Sea of Solitude’s heavy-handed writing often gets in the way of the story it’s trying to tell, since it’s hard to buy into a relationship where someone says “you’re the kind of person I could imagine having kids with” on the first date. Things don’t always turn out how Kay wants, but eventually she accepts that the right decision isn’t necessarily the ideal one and that not all relationships can last. It doesn’t even have to be an epic, but if you have thoughts on gaming, new or old, then share them with us and you will find yourself recapped, (or perhaps even Promo’d), next week.Most of all, I respect that Sea of Solitude isn’t all happy endings. Thanks to Lord Spencer for providing us with the recap! If you fancy adding your own thoughts on all things gaming, then head to the Cblogs section and have your say. – ChronoLynxx opens this week’s TGIF community forum for open discussion. – PhilsPhindings discusses the similarities between the soundtrack of Final Fantasy VIII and Japanese Dance Pop music. – Black Red Gaming shares 10 gaming-related news stories that ran the rounds last week. – BRAV0 F1VE reviews the deck-building game, Griftlands. – Queen of Philosophy shares their thoughts on Sea of Solitude. – Flegma shares his thoughts on the MSX game, Quartet. – Kerrik52 reviews Forbidden Siren 2 as part of his Traveler in Playtime review blogs. – Black Red Gaming discusses revisiting the favorite games, with The Outer Wilds being such a game. – Virtua Kazama writes about how Super Smash Bros. introduced him to his favorite game. ![]()
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