Call of the Sea [XO, XBSX|S, PC]

It is on my list to get around to, but it's so large of what I have in flight now. Such a problem to have as a gamer!

I saw some say the performance is a little rough in spots, so may work out if they do patch up the performance. That was the only slightly negative thing I heard about it. Everything else has been very positive and enjoyable.

 

I'm on Chapter 3, but I'm taking it slow. Story is a little interesting so far. I'm playing on OneS so performance is all over the place (up to 60fps). The puzzles have been mostly straightforward so far.

 

So happy it is on the game pass! I am gonna try it on XSX when I am done with my current queue.

 

Finished it a week ago, and definitely worth a try imo.

It reminds me a bit about the old Myst game in its gradual building of the story and the puzzle focus, and I think the difficulty of the puzzles are very good (with the exception of one, that I found perplexing and frankly not too logical). It is also fairly new to me to see a Lovecraft inspired game with less focus on horror, and with no action game tendencies whatsoever. Also nice to see middle-aged lead characters.
I saw a few very minor performance hitches on the Xbox Series X, but this game has absolutely no action sequences, and the few puzzles that required timing didn't seem to be affected, so I wouldn't wait to play it for technical reasons on the series X.
The only problematic aspect of the game, that I experienced, was the developers decision to make walking - and even running - speed to be fairly slow, which had an impact on how fast I could solve some of the puzzles.

 

Which puzzle did you find perplexing?

Performance on the Sunken level (chapter 5?) wasn't great on the One X. Wasn't a deal-breaker though. One of the odd things though was that there were lots of examples where the voice-acting/subtitles/on-screen text didn't match. Examples where some of the hand-written letters didn't match the text when you selected "read" or the voice-acting and subtitles differed a fair bit. I guess they ran of time to fix all that stuff.

 

Well, the one right before the drum puzzle (the drum puzzle itself was easy) where you had to set the dial for each of the symbols. Never really caught the logic of that one, but I'm suspecting I was overthinking the solution. Eventually I found the right solution, but one of the dials position just seemed wrong (the one you shouldn't move if I remember correctly).

Yeah, had a few of these on series X as well, and especially the narrated letters had some issues in playback. I think it could use a little more polishing, but I didn't find any game-breaking or serious bugs.

 

Spoiler

The puzzle with the transformation/liquid/life/eternal symbols? IIRC the main thing you had to grasp was that diamonds/stars on the dials represented where the individual symbols needed to be to complete the full set of words as displayed in your journal. e.g. the transformation symbol (two vertical dots in a diamond) only appears in the top right section of the completed combination of symbols, so you needed to turn the dial with the single star until it appeared in the top right (slightly complicated by the fact you're moving "north" rather than turning the dial). Similarly life (small arc on the left hand side of the diamond) appears in each word except the top right corner, so you had to set a dial with three stars to the correct orientation. There was only one combination where all four symbols could then create the correct "words".

Something like that anyway.

 

Thanks, that does seem to make sense. I didn't get it at the time though, my mind was fixated on a different (and wrong) solution that just happened to be 75% correct anyway