The writing can be very “tell, not show” at times and feels ham-fisted at points, especially in the opening section where she throws extreme amounts of exposition at the player as she wakes up. Norah constantly narrates, providing story background, commenting on what she sees on the island, and speculates on what’s waiting for her ahead. Every area you enter will be visually distinct from the previous section, and every chapter provides beautiful landscapes. ![]() The game has stunning art direction, and is one of the better looking games I’ve played in years, especially surprising when coming from an indie studio. This is all fine though, as it gives you more time to see the utterly gorgeous environments dotting the island. Her “sprinting” amounts to your average first-person game’s walking pace, and her “walking” reminds me of when I could barely move from a bout of bronchitis. ![]() And a good thing too! I’m tempted to call (of the sea) Call of the Sea a walking simulator because of the glacial pace she moves around. Norah is fortunate in that the island presents to her only puzzles to impede her progress. The game could do with an optional hint mode to help players when they get stuck, especially since the star of the show is the story, not the puzzles. Embarrassingly, I accidentally brute forced it while toying with the pieces of the puzzle, and still have no idea what I did to make that outcome happen. There is only one puzzle that, admittedly, I wasn’t able to solve in the game, as the systems involved in it were complex enough that it led me to banging Norah’s head against the wall to hopefully shake an answer out. It’s genuinely a pretty relaxing experience, as there’s rarely a time-crunch that will force you to solve quickly outside of a few very forgiving timing puzzles later in the game, so you can wander and ponder to your heart’s content. Overall, the puzzles are enjoyable head-scratchers most of them you can figure out after a few minutes of tinkering and checking your notebook. This makes sense in the story, but can lead to frustrating moments of backtracking and inspecting everything until she throws something into her book. Frequently, a puzzle will require you to view the puzzle itself before Norah will jot notes down in her notebook for it, so you can sometimes think “that must have not been important/ related to the puzzle” because Norah didn’t think so at the time either. ![]() There’s the occasional misstep in an otherwise solid puzzle system, however. Gross! PONDERING PLENTIFUL PERPLEXING POLYNESIAN PISCINE PUZZLES Every clue to solving a puzzle she inspects, she’ll instantly copy into her notebook, which is extremely handy and much preferable to jotting something down on a real piece of paper. The pieces that you can connect to build the answer are never too far from you, and Norah takes rigorous notes in her notebook. These puzzles are in general pretty well thought out, and will require a bit of detective work to solve. But lying between Norah and a hopeful happy ending lies the usual great deal of puzzles that always await women who search for their lost husbands on cursed islands. Harry’s expedition to find answers behind Norah’s medical condition (for some reason centered in the South Pacific) has been missing for some time, and the game begins with the player stepping into the sensible shoes of Norah, who arrives on the “cursed” island where her husband was last seen, hoping to find him and bring him home. She’s an art teacher from England, who is very in love with her now-missing husband, Harry Everhart.
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