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By flotsam
Call of The Sea
Out
of The Blue / Raw Fury
Norah is a woman afflicted, the cause a strange
disease that produces black blotches on her skin. She is also missing a
husband, one for whom she is searching on a strange South Sea island
after he went missing while chasing a cure to the disease. A tinge of
Lovecraftian weirdness infiltrates her endeavours.
All of which is almost window dressing. Which is not
to denigrate the narrative, rather to accentuate that the puzzling
exploration is the thing.
Which on reflection does the narrative a disservice.
Having got to the end, I can say I engaged far more with the story than
I had anticipated, in part a result of the effort that has gone into its
uncovering. It is ultimately an integral part of the whole.
The island is an attractive place, vibrantly coloured
and looking and sounding like a jungly South Sea island should. Clear
and many signs exist of the expedition Norah is following, all of which
can be rummaged through to get insights into what happened, and secure
clues to the conundrums that confront you. Clear and many signs too of
another civilisation, or civilisations, not always civilised in some
respects, but worldly or other-worldly builders of apparent note. It's an
enticing environment.
The game essentially requires you to solve the
conundrums in one area in order to be able to move onto the next. Your
progress will take you deeper and deeper into, and under, the island.
And some other places too.
A journal will automatically take notes and make
drawings, a new entry indicated by a pen-scratching sound and a little
pop-up image. As far I could tell the entries are all significant. If
it's in the journal, you would be well advised to give it close attention
should you want to move on. The journal also keeps a log of Norah’s
efforts, should you wish to review.
Puzzling will often involve deciphering images and
symbols to e.g., lower a bridge or activate some machine, but there are
a few other types of challenges. The puzzles are thoughtful, some harder
than others, none a pushover, none brain bustingly impossible. They
build as you go, and will provide a challenge to most adventure fans,
but not a capricious or unfair one. Only once or twice did I feel
clueless; generally, I felt I (eventually) knew what was being asked of
me by puzzle, and some more poking and prodding and fiddling - plus
further poring over the journal - proved the point.
Norah’s exploration occurs in the first person,
utilising the mouse and keyboard. The WASD keys are used for locomotion
(you will likely only use the W key), the mouse for exploring the
environment. You have complete freedom of movement, and your visual
field is equally uninhibited. Icons and hotspots will indicate something
to do/be looked at/further inspected etc. Every object or other item you
can pick up can be rotated or turned over, and it might well pay to do
so.
You can tweak settings, map keys to your liking (but
not completely – I could not map forward movement to the right mouse
button), and fiddle with some in-game operations (e.g., head bobbing,
camera transition, photosensitivity protection). You can also turn off
“detection” which is described as “shows icon over interactable items on
approach”, but despite its seemingly obvious description I could not
make it do anything different. The game saves automatically, but you can
also save at will, and you can also restart any chapter (there are 6 in
all) once you get that far.
A choice at the end indicates two different narrative
outcomes. I will go back and activate the other one shortly.
All up, Call of the Sea provided nearly 10 hours of
excellent exploratory puzzling, cloaked in a narrative that I liked all
the more as I moved through the game. There is plenty to like, and I
can’t imagine that you won’t.
I played on:
OS: Windows 10, 64 Bit
Processor: Intel i7-9700K 3.7GHz
RAM: Corsair Dominator Platinum RGB DDR4 32GB
Video card: AMD Radeon RX 580 8192MB
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January 2021
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