Owlboy
Owlboy is a story-driven platform adventure game, where you can fly and explore a brand new world in the clouds! Pick up your friends, and bring them with you as you explore the open skies. Overcome obstacles and greater enemies, in one of the most detailed adventures of this era. Being a mute, Otus struggles living up to the expectations of owl-hood. Things spiral from bad to worse with the sudden appearance of sky pirates. What follows is a journey through monster infested ruins, with unexpected encounters, well kept secrets, and burdens no one should have to bear. A love letter to pixel art for a new audience, Owlboy is a story-driven action adventure, with a unique mix of flight and platforming. Carry anything. Recruit Otus’s friends as gunners to fight for you, each with unique abilities and stories. Large dungeons with big and challenging boss battles. An adventure 10 years in the making.
Steam User 49
Seeing this game at "mixed" for recent reviews is insane. Owlboy is a cornerstone of hi-bit, SNES-style innovation, and features some of the best dungeon design outside of the 2d Zelda games. The story also builds and gives you a far more dramatic and affecting narrative than the artstyle and character design might imply.
This games feels like how you remember those first SNES games making you feel. If you're craving that kind of retro action-adventure, this is a modern classic.
Steam User 16
Leaving a review because I really don't know why people are leaving negative reviews, and I want to help counter them a bit.
Game's great, art is great, characters are great, music is great, story is great (aside a plot hole or two), and the controls are fine - especially on a controller. There isn't an option to turn off aim-assist though, and the cannon minigame can absolutely do one, but otherwise a genuinely good, admittedly short-ish game.
Ignore the reviews that whine about this game not having 'expansive worlds to explore' and 'doesn't know what it wants to be'. BOTW has a lengthy stealth section, but I doubt anyone would cry that that game couldn't decide what it wanted to be. The game isn't a super long adventure, but it packs plenty in with a fairly quick sense of progression. The map isn't huge, but the locations are genuinely memorable and backtracking isn't much of an issue due to the length of the game, anyway.
In short; know that Owlboy is a genuinely, really good, but short 2D platformer adventure that takes the concept of infinite flight and runs with it.
Steam User 14
Came in blind, was pleasantly surprised until the last level came.
I'm not a platformer guy, in fact I don't like platformers at all. This game is not a platformer game, not up until the last level. JUMP, GLIDE and CANCEL GLIDE button should not be the same. It's the main reason why I hated platformers with glide mechanics. And this game have these moves stuck to a single button with the addition of UP button to glide which makes movement on the final level a big chore to finish. I can't even fathom why people make this the standard. Separate the GLIDE and CANCEL GLIDE button people! Also don't make the UP button turn on the GLIDE mechanic. It's a movement disaster specially when using a controller.
Rant over let's review the game. The game is a twin-stick shooter mix with an old school JRPG storytelling. This combo is great and makes the impact of the story more compelling. You feel the sense of adventure with each dialogue. The story is this game's strongest asset, it's a kid going on an adventure with his friends and you can feel their emotions with the way it is structured.
Controls are great up until the last level. Some people might have a problem with tracking your character because another character pops up when you're shooting at targets. It makes it look like you have a bigger hitbox but I think only the owl can be hit(not sure on this one). And having the shooter bigger than the owl makes dodging a little tougher in some cases because your brain is focused on the shooter and not the owl.
Bosses are fine except for some which takes away the camera from you so you often lose track of where you are.
Personally I would rate this 8/10. 9 if not for the final level.
P.S. F*ck that cannon mini-game.
Steam User 10
In short, this is a short, very polished game that will make you feel in the presence of a respectable adventure. While not a neat finish for a game, piecing it together can make the game feel a bit better as a whole. It also takes the realization that this was a 10 year passion project that D-Pad Studio barely survived.
This is not worth $25 territory; however, it is definitely worth it as a game around $10-15 if you are up for a game with well written characters.
The primary part you are getting from this game is story. It feels like a book, not in theme, but in how it paces its story and wraps up fairly quickly. Each character is meaningful even if they can be somewhat 2D at times. It's not a very deep underdog story; however, it is decently executed.
The combat in this game is moderately ok. Not difficult by any means. You will find common enemies quite easy, but bosses in this game are actually quite balanced once you solve their patterns. The game makes up for combat with pretty decent stealth sections of the game. At first, it feels restrictive; however, it does not treat you being found as instant death. In fact, later on you have a few different options in how you maintain your stealth.
This game is completely linear outside of its overworld. You are pushed from key point to key point without too much say in the matter, and the game does use convenient metroidvania-like blocks to keep you from progressing where you are not meant to yet. This game doesn't seem to fit the mystery of exploration that metroidvanias have though. It only really takes the unlockable pathway concept.
The game's "coins" are a treasure hunter's completionist sink. If you like searching for the last bits of stuff, it has you covered. None of the coins are missable.
The payoff of the ending: I'm going to put it like this. This game had a ton of cut content. The developers did wrap together an ending that does work; however, it can feel a bit off if you don't pay attention to the main character's growth. I don't consider this a major spoiler as I believe this part of the game is best found before completing the ending. It plainly shows one to you in the first dungeon. This game has 1 bit of extra content that can be found by gathering 3 key items. You have to retreat before actually finishing the game if you want to explore for what it is.
There is no true ending to chase after. See this game for what it is. It's the best a dev team could push together after having to cut quite alot. And, while not perfect, this game is solidly worth your time if you want an uplifting story.
I'm glad to have seen how Otus, the Owl boy, grew as a character. I hope even 7 years after this game came out, a few more people can find the same just-right satisfaction from it.
Steam User 7
Owlboy does not deserve to be mixed, but it does deserve to be openly and fairly discussed. That means talking about the bits people might not like.
To get this part out of the way'; the people tagging this as a metroidvania are dirty liars. There's no map or heroic progression, in the strictest sense, and the usual foibles don't apply. There's a few similar trappings, but this does not have the spirit that poorly named genre tries to invoke.
Owlboy is a frustrating game to love, though I love it. By the standards of the time period I'm writing in, where tastes flux and change regularly, where patience is become a more and more precious, rare thing, Owlboy demands a fair bit from you. Not in terms of twitchy movements or difficult patterns. Hell, I'd say this is one of the easier games I've played. Despite the fact that you'll run into "that one room" more than once and you'll die a lot in it, the game is quite generous with checkpoints (most of the time). Honestly, I wonder if the game might have been better served with a different health system. But I digress.
You might get frustrated because this game does not play like any other, despite playing like so many of them. You have to wrap your head around the fact that you attack with buddies instead of our main character, a disconnect that will confuse a lot of people. I find if you think of your buddies as guns then it makes more sense, but when we're told it's two people, we believe it's two people.
The story is also taxing. Not because it's wordy, but because it explains so very, very little. Things happen in a linear progression, no event doesn't make sense, per se. But unless you're really paying attention, you'll miss the fact that some people are actually pretty bad at their job. Unless you go looking, you might struggle to realize there are dead parents. And without truly focusing, the existential dread of the plot will sail over one's head through no fault of their own. To buy into this world requires taking so much at face value, and that is asking a fair bit when the game starts, despite being so colorful, quite sad and bitter, then jumps into the action and rarely stops.
there is plenty to admire from its tight design and pixel graphics that, to this day, are breathtaking. But then there's so much that's frustrating, such as the curiously complex plot and having to accept that spiders can be foolish and also friends. If one buys this game, I ask you not to un-recommend the game simply because it doesn't jive with you. This game was a labor of love and deserve to exist peacefully.
Steam User 7
An absolutely wondeful game. Features one of the best pixel arts I've ever seen and a beautiful soundtrack. Presentation is top notch. While the story is only decent, the execution of story beats are really great (especially the ending). Gameplay is fun. Don't go in expecting a metroidvania though, it's more similar to a linear 2D sidescroller with a hub. It focuses more on exploration/puzzle than combat. Definitely worth playing, hopefully there'll be a sequel one day.
Steam User 9
For most of the game, Owlboy didn't really click with me. There are a lot of aspects of the game that I didn't like:
- Combat isn't all that interesting or challenging. The player character can fly and has a very short dodge cooldown, so enemies rarely ever felt threatening.
- Player flight also means that there isn't really any platforming in Owlboy. The game instead adds hazards that the player has to carefully fly around, and it ends up being more tedious than engaging.
- Stealth is stupidly simple. There's only ever one path forward, enemies don't have complex movement patterns, there's no distraction mechanic or any way to bypass by an enemy other than simply waiting for them to look away. It's more of a test of patience than skill.
- It's seriously easy to get lost in Owlboy. Many sections of the game are designed like puzzles, and the game doesn't always do a great job communicating the correct path forward.
- The game doesn't always do a great job of creating safe "room" transition points. This essentially means that, when moving between two areas, It's possible to get hit by an enemy you couldn't react to, since the camera was still transitioning into the new area from the old area. This could be avoided by making sure enemies are never anywhere close to the border between two rooms. Other platformers, even platformers made by much larger studios, do this same exact thing, but it still annoys the heck out of me every time I see it.
- And, as a final note, the writing is painfully, obnoxiously cheesy. Characters don't speak like independently thinking people. So much of the dialogue feels overly-dramatic or out of place. It's the type of story that you skim through as quickly as possible, in the hopes that the story gets better later on.
Fortunately, the story, and the entire game for that matter, does get better later on. Owlboy's endgame is actually really good. The last few bosses are seriously fun and challenging to fight. During the final level, the game becomes much less confusing to traverse and even removes the player's flight abilities to create some actual platforming challenges. The game's ending was unexpectedly emotional and beautiful, and I ended up finishing the game with a positive view of the game despite its early frustrations. Owlboy isn't a *great* game, and I couldn't recommend it to everyone. But, a stupendous amount of work and passion went into this game, and the ending in particular is good enough that I ended up liking the game as a whole.