Ocean’s Heart [Switch]
Ocean’s Heart, developed by Max Mraz, is a pixel-art action-RPG reminiscent of early 2D Legend of Zelda games. Pirates have attacked your small village, burning homes to the ground and kidnapping your best friend Hazel in the process. As a volunteer Navyman, your dad Mallow has set out to rescue her, expecting to be back within a week - but it’s now six months later and there’s still no sign of them. So it’s up to Tilia to follow in her father’s footsteps and head off on her own journey to find and bring them home.
Armed with a sword and protected by some basic armour, you’ll have to search high and low for clues as to your dad’s whereabouts, with NPCs that have crossed paths with him remarking about your familiar face - apparently you have your father’s nose - and giving you information that might help you on your quest. Some will want favours in return for info, whereas others will give you details of any locations they believe he could have been heading off to next, turning things into a huge game of cat and mouse, with plenty of pirates getting in your way in the process. Over time you’ll acquire new and improved weapons as well as armour upgrades, and these will help you gain access to new areas and secret locations.
You’ve got a Quest Log to keep track of tasks, broken down into Main Quests and Side Quests, and this is something I found myself to be looking at pretty much constantly, trying to remember where I need to go. As there’s such a wide variety of optional quests to take on, you’ll find that many of them overlap - with you needing to go to certain places to retrieve items or clear out areas of any monsters - and due to the map being just a rough overview of all of the islands, it can be easy to forget where certain things are for later reference, so there’s a lot of to-ing and fro-ing to be done. There are some missions that have different endings, with options ranging from turning someone in for their crimes or letting them off with it, depending on how you feel about their reasons; and these open up alternate dialogue with NPCs, and ways that they will repay you further down the line.
With a bright pixel art style, and a variety of well detailed locations ranging from the Forest of Tides and the waterlogged Lotus Shoal to the haunted Snapmast Reef, each filled with creatively designed enemies that vary between being visual references to classic Zelda enemies, and unique monsters with unusual appearances. There’s not really ‘bosses’ to come up against as such, instead just more advanced enemies representative of dungeon bosses - but far easier to deal with than any we’ve come up against in similar titles, especially as you can eat to replenish health during fights. The soundtrack is enjoyable, with a good selection of retro tunes that are a pleasure to listen to as you traverse the world, each capturing the tone of the relevant areas of the map beautifully.
Overall, Ocean’s Heart is a lot of fun - and very compelling to explore. Upgrading my weaponry and armour quickly made me significantly overpowered compared to the majority of enemies, even the larger dungeon-boss styled ones - however, there is an area of the map that you can visit in order to increase the strength of the enemies in the world, which is a fantastic way for you to have some control over the difficulty, and to regain some challenge once things prove to be too easy.
Whilst Ocean’s Heart doesn’t break any new ground, it has a charming feel to it and really encourages you to explore thoroughly and speak to everyone you meet as there’s a lot of humour within the dialogue for you to appreciate. Priced at £13.49 on the Switch eShop, it’s definitely a reasonable price for what we found to be an enjoyable throwback to classic 2D action-RPGs.
In the end, we decided to give Ocean’s Heart the Collecting Asylum rating of 8.5/10.
Are you interested in Ocean’s Heart? What do you think of it?
Let us know in the comments below!
- V x
Thank you to Plan of Attack for the Ocean’s Heart Switch review code!
