Through confronting these monsters, Kay will not only learn more about them, but also herself and what it means to be human. Meet a variety of beautiful and terrifying monsters, each with their own struggles of loneliness to tell. Face the monsters within - Encounter fantastical creatures, solve puzzles, and rid the world of tainted memories. Water levels rise and fall to reflect her own state of mind, transforming the flooded city landscape into new areas for the player to explore with new challenges to face. A metaphorical world - As her journey evolves, Kay’s dark and stormy environment begins to transform, with light and color shining into the world.Players must help Kay see below the surface and beyond, guiding her through her Sea of Solitude in this deeply touching tale of darkness and light. An emotional journey - Sea of Solitude embarks players on a nuanced and intimate action-adventure, experienced through the mind of Kay, as she struggles to overcome her loneliness.Dare to look what lies beneath the surface, in a haunting struggle of darkness and light, and discover what it truly means to be human. Explore a flooded city by boat, on foot, or by swimming through the water itself. Meet fantastical creatures and monsters, learn their stories, and solve challenges. Set sail across a beautiful and evolving world where nothing is quite what it seems. Sea of Solitude takes you on a personal journey of a young woman’s loneliness. There are some enjoyable, even magical moments, in Sea of Solitude but they’re mixed in with some mediocrity that make it just a decent experience rather than sublime one.When humans get too lonely, they turn into monsters… It felt like it ran out of things to offer me long before it ended. While not a long game, by the end of Sea of Solitude I just wanted things to be done. The story was compelling enough that I wanted to see it through to the end, but the repetitive tasks within it lost their charm in the first half. It’s beautiful to look at, but it ends up being a lovely splash in a shallow pond. Sea of Solitude’s potential is never fully realized. Towards the end of the four- to six-hour story, there’s a slight variation on how you clear corruptions where you have to work with NPCs to reach some swarms that are otherwise inaccessible, but this quickly becomes a boring back-and-forth. That’s fun for a time, but unfortunately it never really changes in interesting ways as you play, eventually getting overly repetitive. The school chapter also establishes that gameplay loop of meeting a monster, getting to know their problems, and then getting rid of corruptions until they’re human again very early on. There’s no real point to it, no story reason for doing so, and it seems unnecessarily rude to the seagulls. You just have to find seagulls and shoo them away. The other collectible you can track down is, by comparison, a snooze. Plus exploring and enjoying the lovely environments was one of the best parts of Sea of Solitude. While these are optional to the main campaign, going out of my way to get them was a great way to add an extra challenge. They serve as both a fun thing to hunt for and an interesting and eerie reminder that others have been here before. Scattered throughout the world are different collectibles to find, the best of which are the messages in bottles. The voice acting didn’t help in this regard because the larger than life cadence of the monsters often made things feel like an overacted stage play rather than a series of real conversations. Intense screams and overuse of exclamations such as “leave me alone!” felt overly dramatic and consistently took me out of the story. If that was me, I would be asking for the bill early. It’s a shame that Sea of Solitude’s heavy-handed writing often gets in the way of the story it’s trying to tell, since it’s hard to buy into a relationship where someone says “you’re the kind of person I could imagine having kids with” on the first date. Things don’t always turn out how Kay wants, but eventually she accepts that the right decision isn’t necessarily the ideal one and that not all relationships can last. Most of all, I respect that Sea of Solitude isn’t all happy endings.
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