Mythic Ocean

Genre: Visual Novel / First-Person Walking Simulator

Players: 1

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Review:

(Note: This game is included in Nakana Bundle #2 (Mythic Ocean + Journey of the Broken Circle + Cosmic Top Secret), along with Cosmic Top Secret and Journey of the Broken Circle. This game is also included in Nakana Bundle #4, along with Journey of the Broken Circle, Lydia, Soul Searching, and Stilstand. Additionally, this game is also in Nakana Bundle #6 (10 games), along with A Night at the Races, Cosmic Top Secret, Eqqo, Infini, Journey of the Broken Circle, Lydia, Please Touch The Artwork, Soul Searching, and Stilstand.)

Mythic Ocean, originally released on PC in 2020 and ported to Nintendo Switch and Xbox One in 2021, is a family-friendly game that fits somewhere between Visual Novel and Walking Simulator in terms of its genre. Players explore various underwater locales and speak with various residents, offering advice to characters representing nascent gods, with the choices the player makes ultimately determining which of the group will rise above the others to recreate the universe. Or at least, that seems to be the gist of things. It’s all sorta’ abstract.

The presentation here is quite nice, featuring some colorful, beautifully-designed 3D environments and an interesting assortment of characters. There’s nothing here with quite the same environmental complexity as the Subnautica games we saw on Nintendo Switch earlier this year, but it’s still quite pleasant to look at, regardless. However, while the visuals are nice, I’d argue that the music here is even better, with some beautiful new agey themes like Omens, Neverending Party, The Open Ocean, Verdant Overflow, and Rainbow Playground. This wonderful soundtrack does a great job backing the placid, beautiful environments of the game.

Players move around the game’s aquatic environments in 3D space, so I suppose technically it’d be more fitting to call this game a “Swimming Simulator” than a Walking Simulator, but the basic idea is the same. However, while exploring the 3D space here can be interesting, it’s largely secondary to the main focus of the gameplay here, which is the conversations with the aforementioned “gods”. These take the form of archetypal beings, each with a very specific focus and personality much as you might find in any pantheon – one focused purely on sustenance and survival, one focused on fun and frivolity, to name a few. And in part due to their own unique focus, each of these characters faces their own struggles, both in their own right as well as with the others.

In a way, speaking to these gods almost feels like giving parental advice. Don’t be selfish, you should socialize more, give that other god another chance, that sort of thing. Of course, you could also go a different direction, tell them their concerns are justified and placate their primal urges. I suppose another way of looking at this game is almost like one of those online personality quiz sorta’ things filtered into conversations with various characters, with choices along the lines of “Which is better, safety or freedom?”. Your advice to these characters seems like it’s a reflection of you just as much as it is a way to shape the story.

As you give these characters advice, you can also gauge them for their opinions on each other, and players can also consult an eel they meet early on to get a feel for how each of these characters feels about you and who’s winning the race to be the new creator of the universe, as it were. I kinda’ feel like much of this is not very well-explained, and likely intentionally so. I’m not quite sure what criteria is used to determine which god is “winning”, or even who my character is or why they’re involved in the first place. Like I said before, this all seems fairly abstract, and although the characters here are interesting and likeable, it’s hard to feel much weight to your choices when you don’t fully comprehend the stakes for those choices. On the bright side though, the variety of different characters to focus on, and the different choices available, both give this game a fair amount of replay value to pursue other dialogue paths.

There are a few more mechanical issues I should address here. The controls here feel sluggish and a bit unwieldy, although this game thankfully doesn’t require quick action or anything like that. And on the bright side of things, the game makes it easy to jump to any of the gods you’ve already spoken to automatically, saving you the hassle of having to travel back and forth between them, something I could see as getting tedious very quickly, especially when you need to act as a go-between for a few of them.

Overall, I enjoyed my time with Mythic Ocean, although its strange blend of Visual Novel and Walking Simulator and its abstract story still leaves me a bit puzzled as to the full extent of just what it is I actually played. Players looking for a more relaxed game with a nice presentation and enjoyable characters may find this to be worth a look, and if you’re the sort of person who enjoys those online personality quiz sorta’ things, this is kinda’ that in videogame form… well, sorta’.

tl;dr – Mythic Ocean is a game that’s part Visual Novel, part Walking Simulator (swimming simulator?), part personality quiz, with players advising various archetypal god figures in an abstract undersea environment. The game sets a great relaxed mood with an excellent soundtrack, and the characters you meet and choices you make are compelling, even if the abstract nature of the game makes everything feel somewhat nebulous.

Grade: B

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This game has been nominated for one or more of eShopperReviews 2021 Game Awards:

Runner-Up: Best Music

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