Owlboy

Beautiful but flawed

Why

Why Not

Impressions

There's plenty of evidence Owlboy took even longer than Silksong to make. The absurdly detailed pixel art, clever enemy interactions with the environment and intruiging world building show the incredible care the devs obviously put into it over 9 years. Unfortunately the tiresome gameplay, unnecessary friction and inconsistent plot are likely also byproducts of this process, the result of a game which doesn't quite seem sure what it is.

Owlboy's gameplay has some interesting ideas; our protagonist Otis can fly and spin attack on his own but to be effective in combat he'll need to pick up a friend to act as his gunner. An early-game dungeon provides a helpful teleporting macguffin to avoid the incredibly painful requirment of manually picking up your gunner before that point, allowing you to quickly switch between them on the fly. Each gunner has different strengths, but ultimately the only interesting one is the last, who you obtain in the last 20% or so of the game and can't use for a fair chunk of that.

Geddy, your friend and first gunner, just shoots little energy balls at a fair rate of fire. The next, a reformed pirate named Alphonse, brings a flamethrowing shotgun to bear. Sounds much more exciting right? Well, it takes 6 seconds to recharge after each shot, so that excitement is pretty short-lived. Also its range is tiny, and the button for its lighter mode is the same as firing normally, so using the lighter means putting your shot on cooldown. By contrast the final gunner, Twig, gives you a rapidly firing web shooter which incapacitates enemies in one shot and a grappling dash with an insane number of iframes which can also pull objects/enemies towards you.

More Twig-like design for the other gunners might have relieved the tedium of playing through the middle of the game, but alas once the initial wonder at the beautiful scenery and interesting interactions wear off you're stuck banging your head against problems until you figure out the trick, then immediately and effortlessly clearing them. This instant switch between success and failure might feel more at home in a puzzle game, but in a more action-focused game like this I'd expect and enjoy a more gradual mastery curve. The repeated deaths necessary to figure out gimmicks aren't helper by the requirement to watch decently large chunks of the preceding cutscenes either. The devs are clearly aware this might be a problem since some have the ability to skip, but others on't and even the skippable ones are still occasionally followed by a (shorter) unskippable scene.

From what I've written so far you might think I hated Owlboy; on the contrary I had a pretty good time with it. It's just frustrating how uneven the game is. There are a lot of clever mechanics here, but they're let down by base gameplay that's just dull. The worldbuilding is interesting, but let down by a meandering story where everything you do just seems to make things worse and drum in that you're a failure. I can't think of a counterpoint to the incredible pixel art though, and I think that's what makes this game something I can recommend in the end. It has its flaws, but the gameplay never quite makes its way to unfun and there are enough stunning vistas and intriguing scraps of lore to keep you interested over the relatively short ~12 hour runtime. If you like the art give it a chance, but be prepared to need your brain more than your reflexes.