Call Of the Sea | Review of the new exclusive for Xbox and PC
Norah's Voyage
Call Of The Sea tells the story of Norah Everhart, a young woman afflicted by an unknown disease, and hereditary nature, who slowly , is leading her towards a lethal epilogue. The young man's husband, wanting to save his beloved at all costs, leaves for Micronesia in search of an elixir that could cure the young woman. A desperate journey that rests its foundations on the only hope that a legend can prove true. However, the traces of Norah's reckless companion are soon lost and, when the young woman receives a mysterious package containing a dagger and a photo of Harry, she too decides to leave for the remote Pacific island in search of her. beloved.That Call of The Sea is a production made by veterans of the sector can already be understood from the management of the narrative sector. A story that smells of 90's graphic adventure, as deep in transmitting emotions in the player, as light and disengaged in its staging. The developers' love for Lovecraft's literature is revealed from the early stages of the game but the title remains faithful to the artistic, colorful and playful style, transposing only the most dreamlike and surreal elements of the Providence writer's imagination. We are not, therefore, faced with a horror production sprinkled with, sporadic, romantic moments; Call Of The Sea is a story of love, and adventure, which in seven hours entertains the player with a solid, engaging writing and daughter of a past videogame era, all paying homage to one of the most important horror writers in history.
A gameplay between the past and the present
Just as the story of Call of The Sea seems to have taken weight from the point and click adventures of the 90s, its gameplay does not differ much from those stylistic features, trying to arrange them to current standards to guarantee the player greater interaction with the game environments. The whole adventure will be experienced firsthand, through Norah's eyes, and will simply require you to solve puzzles and explore environments in search of clues that shed light on the story's events and provide suggestions on how to solve the various puzzles scattered throughout the game. In other words: the perfect meeting point between a point and click and a walking simulator.Although, however, everything is well done in terms of setting, game progression and management of clues, they are really the puzzles that present playful solutions that are not always brilliant and that constantly oscillate in terms of quality. In fact, on more than one occasion, we have found ourselves faced with the possibility of solving a puzzle, simply by trial and error or using a pinch of inventiveness. In different contexts, a creak like this would simply be considered a smudge, but in Call Of the Sea, where puzzles make up almost the totality of the playful offer, we expected to find a different solidity in its puzzles. If we then go to add the absurd complexity of some challenges placed in the middle of the adventure (totally unbalanced in terms of challenge), we cannot really understand how the developers consider this component of the game that, given the structure of the entire adventure, had to be posed. , mostly, as a playful parenthesis within an excellent narrative sector.
