The grass is vibrantly green, there’s adorable little wild pigs running around and little danger as you get your fingers and thumbs around the basic controls and menus. Though the game is procedurally generated, the opening chain of small islands are more tightly constrained to ease players into the adventure. It is there, but it’s often so low in the audio mix that it feels completely absent. The only thing I feel is missing at times is the sound of the ocean, which I’d love to have a far greater presence than it does. The up tempo drums that thump as you fight territorial animals switch to sweeping piano and strings when you take to the seas and head over to a new landmass. The light and joyous plucked strings as you chase after little wild pigs on the first island make way for groaning didgeridoo-like sounds as you encounter the strange and unnatural rock formations. The music that accompany this is lovely, injecting playfulness, tension, drama and majesty as they’re required. It’s nowhere near as toon-like as Wind Waker, perhaps coming by way of Breath of the Wild, but there’s certainly some common ground to be found. The camera starts to feel more dynamic, the sounds become more evocative of crossing the open waters, and there’s a real The Legend of Zelda: Wind Waker vibe, thanks in part to the stylised visuals. Regardless of the size of your boat, it’s a wonderful feeling as you sail between islands. By the fourth chapter, you should easily have two or three hulls strapped together with a basic platform on it, as well as a fire that you can stoke to cook food and a cooker for concocting potions.
In truth, we only got to scratch the surface of what’s possible here, our play time giving us a relatively short window to see the game’s opening moments, and then jump ahead a few chapters to see how the boat can evolve. The boat makes for an intriguing change of pace, starting off with a simple canoe made of grass and then expanding it to have multiple pontoons, decking, a sail, and everything that you need to be able to gather from each island you visit and craft new gear to prepare you for the next. Exploring this new land, it’s not long before you find the Oar of the Ancestors atop an unusual rock formation, the oar responding to kara’s touch and the necklace that she wears, and giving you the key tool with which you can set sail once more and start to reveal more of the game’s story. Thankfully, that’s not the end of her – this would be a very, very short game if it were – and she wakes up on a frankly idyllic little island with nothing to hand but her trusty little knife. The game starts with Kara finding herself shipwrecked in a heavy storm, seemingly at the hands of a gigantic Nautilus sea monster.
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