The controller seems like a pretty good control system. The pop up radial menu is mapped to clicking the right stick, which isn’t ideal, but overall I am not fighting with the controls. Maneuvering the ship is straightforward.
In handheld it’s running at something less than 720p on the Switch, which is no surprise. I haven’t really felt any slowdowns. But it’s early and I think the problems mostly show up in certain parts of Eleutheria.
The story/RPG elements are perfectly fine on the Switch. The writing is good and has a sly sense of humor that wears well.
I like a good drift inertia mechanic. I’m not deep into the ship stuff yet.
I haven’t played it docked yet. I suspect the resolution loss will be more apparent.
Having got this in a Humble and deciding to wait until the release of Sovereign I am pleasantly surprised. The art is very stylistic and good. The narrative and writing (so far) has been good and the gameplay engaging and simple. Reminds me of Sid Meyer’s Pirates in a good way.
Yeah I am enjoying this way more than Sunless sea , but I may revisit that and give it another chance down the line. I admit I didn’t give that game a fair amount of playtime.
I almost pulled the trigger yesterday! But then backed off, for now. Still waiting on confirmation that the Series X version is good and doesn’t have bugs, etc.
I put about an hour into the Switch version (handheld) last night, and I think it’s generally very good. There were a few slowdowns here and there, and I’ll echo the complaint about the radial menu mapping/lack of remapping options, but that’s manageable. And I figure I’ll probably put more time into this as a handheld game than I would sitting down at my PC.
For what it’s worth, I’m pretty happy with the controller support at this point. I’m having an easier time dealing with combat, which offsets whatever minor hassles come up elsewhere.
After several more hours with the Switch version docked last night and a couple handheld today, I do see quite a few framerate hitches when the background effects get a little busy, but nothing that has hindered me.
This game has its hooks in deep, though. I totally see what sold other folks on the game. They took just enough edge off of the Sunless Sea resource balancing formula to make me actually enjoy the exploration between ports, and it’s really tough to turn down just one more port when shutting the game off. Sleep mode and the portability of the Switch version make this really easy to pick back up.
It really is a fantastic game; and a huge improvement over Seas in every way in my book. I put a couple more hours into it last night, and only finally put it down because I needed to head to bed.
My only lingering quibble with the Switch version is that when there’s a big dump of text (not exactly an uncommon occurrence) it leaves the window at the bottom, making me have to scroll back up to find the start of it.
Still, I’ve spent the first half of my work day thinking about getting back home and firing it right up again.
I am not that hardcore about he Switch as an indie machine, but I have a combined 300 hours in Slay the Spire and Into the Breach. So yeah, it’s great for stuff like this. Break it out for 30 minutes for a couple runs.
I’d say no, actually. It’s sort of a roguelike, but there’s not enough variation in each playthrough to actually pull off roguelikeness. Play it on Merciful so you can reload at your last port.
Yeah, I’m playing on Merciful, but for my fourth death, I just started over- I finally staggered into a port and got more supplies, but was kind of down on crew. By the time I died again, I was piloting the boat by myself, which was basically falling apart around me. I could have started over at that last port, and pulled it out of the death spiral by heading right back to the central port, but I decided it just wasn’t worth it. Remember kids, the starting boat really doesn’t like having less than 6 crew- if you do, you get random bad events as you’re driving around, that often sap more crew, accelerating the problem- and the only place to get new crew is the hub city.
Thoughts about the console port. It plays very well. Graphics are nice, no slowdown or anything. I dislike the way the radial menu works, and there’s no way to remap it, so I guess I’ll have to live with it. The soundtrack seems kind of meh, but Xbox has fucking amazing Spotify integration, so I fired up some Explosions in the Sky and grooved out to that while tooling around. It was excellent.
So some survival tips for the Reach when you begin.
The location of various ports and settlements within the Reach are randomized each game…within some parameters. Think of New Winchester as a hub with invisible concentric rings that surround it. Some ports and settlements are always on certain rings of these circles, even if sometimes they’re east, north, west or south. But once you start a game, those locations are placed and they’re set where they are.
Start by looking for the inner “ring” ports first, and visit them the most when you start.Take all the trade opportunities you can, though be careful too. You can only have three active trade opportunities at one time. You don’t want to fill up on trade opportunities with ports you haven’t found yet, especially once you’re a handful of hours into the game. If you see an opportunity with a port name you don’t recognize, assume it’s in the outer ring, and maybe wait for easier stuff – especially if you haven’t traded in your first ship yet.
Your first ship is junk. The hold is too small for it to be an effective trader, and it’s neither fast nor well-armed. Your goal in the early game is to get enough money to get a better ship that will be worth improving and sinking some funds into.
Run if you have to. Use stealth if you need to. Turning off the headlight on the ship is a good way to avoid a confrontation you may not be able to win…but it’s also going to jack your terror up quickly.
Don’t even think of leaving the Reach for the next world (no spoilers) until you’ve bought a new ship and put some more firepower and expanded your hold size. The next area, you’re going to need plenty of room for fuel and supplies, all I’m saying.
Finally, though I mentioned terror before, don’t sweat it too much early on. In fact, some terror is kind of fun – it’s very thematic in a whole Captain Nemo meets Lovecraft kinda way. Sailing back to New Winchester (and some other ports) if you haven’t been back in a while will reduce terror for you. There are other ways to mitigate it in The Reach as well that you’ll find.
With regards to terror – that’s one of the major system changes in the game since launch. When I completed my first game waaaaaay back when, I didn’t have to deal too much with terror until the second half of the game, and even by the end of the game it felt like the game engine expected me to have far more lingering terror than I actually did.
They’ve since made terror a lot more of a thing to have to deal with earlier and then in an ongoing way. Which is good! You get a lot more interesting story beats this way. You also have to seek out ways to mitigate your terror much, much earlier, and that seems super-thematic to me as well. I mean, it’s fun later in the game to have a mission you know is going to take you right into a spot where you’re likely to just get hit hard by terror over and over again…and really dread having to go there because you know how much it’s likely to make your captain kind of a mess for a while.
