Nakana Bundle #2 (Mythic Ocean + Journey of the Broken Circle + Cosmic Top Secret)

Genre: Compilation / Various

Players: 1

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Review:

(Note: Some of these games also appear in other bundles. Cosmic Top Secret is also included in Nakana Bundle #5, along with A Night at the Races, Eqqo, Infini, and Please Touch The Artwork. Mythic Ocean and Journey of the Broken Circle are also included in Nakana Bundle #4, along with Lydia, Soul Searching, and Stilstand. And all three games in this bundle are also included in Nakana Bundle #6 (10 games), along with A Night at the Races, Eqqo, Infini, Lydia, Please Touch The Artwork, Soul Searching, and Stilstand.)

Nakana Bundle #2 (Mythic Ocean + Journey of the Broken Circle + Cosmic Top Secret), released on the Nintendo Switch in 2021, is a Compilation of the three games listed in the title, which were all released separately on Nintendo Switch in 2020 and 2021. The games are fairly different from each other, with their only real common elements being that all three games put a good amount of focus on story, and they were all published by Nakana.io.

I have previously reviewed all of these games. Here is what I thought of each of the games in this collection:

Game	Genre	# of Players	Grade
Mythic Ocean	Visual Novel / First-Person Walking Simulator	1	B
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.
Journey of the Broken Circle	Platformer	1	C+
tl;dr Journey of the Broken Circle is a story-focused Platformer that tells an abstract tale about relationships through its gameplay starring a circle missing a piece. This game has some good story dealing with its central topic, and uses gameplay mechanics in some clever ways to deliver that story, but both the story and the gameplay are uneven, with thoughtful examinations injected with cringe-worthy cliches, and good use of gameplay mechanics brought down by sections that are snoozefests and others with sharp difficulty spikes. Overall it’s still a good experience, but a very uneven one.
Cosmic Top Secret	Graphic Adventure	1	C
tl;dr Cosmic Top Secret is a game that loosely fits into the Graphic Adventure genre, focusing on a young Danish woman trying to pry answers out of her retired Cold War-era military parents about their past. This is absolutely not a game for everyone, but its weird, unique, weird, personal, superficially amateurish, and above all else weird presentation may strike your fancy… or it may not.

So, out of all three games here, I think that Mythic Ocean is by far the best of the lot. However, to some degree I think this is really going to vary based on personal tastes – Mythic Ocean is stylistically beautiful but also abstract in ways that not everyone will appreciate but some will likely enjoy. Cosmic Top Secret is quirky, weird, and personal in ways that not everyone will appreciate but some will likely enjoy. And Journey of the Broken Circle is… Well, a decent enough Platformer but not a great one, but with a symbolic story that not everyone will appreciate but some will likely enjoy. Yeah, a whole lot of “your mileage may vary” in this package. At the very least I can say that nothing here is outright bad, but some of it may not speak to you, personally.

Of course, this “your mileage may vary” thing may not be too difficult to swallow if the value is good enough. In that regard, Nakana Bundle #2 fares very well – at $20, this Compilation is a pretty steep discount compared to the $33 these games would cost separately, and it’s only $5 more than Mythic Ocean costs on its own

I can’t say for sure whether or not you’ll like the three games in Nakana Bundle #2, because whether you enjoy these games will really come down to personal preference, even more than most games. However, none of these games is outright bad, and at least one of the included games is one I believe is truly great. For $20, you’re getting a good deal on this trio of games, and between the three, it seems like a pretty fair bet that you’ll find something to love here.

tl;dr – Nakana Bundle #2 is a Compilation of Mythic Ocean, Journey of the Broken Circle, and Cosmic Top Secret, three games that share little in common other than their publisher and a desire to tell a story. While I think Mythic Ocean is the star of this Collection, I recognize that all three of these games are fairly unique in ways that mean that whether you like them or not will come down to personal preference. However, at $20, this bundle is priced very nicely, and I suspect that players eager for unique story-focused games will likely find something here to make it well worth that excellent price.

Grade: B-

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