Owlboy | Review | Let's Play With The Conquistadork
7In the passing years since I’ve started writing about games, I have been loathe to refer to any of them as “charming”. It just feels like a cop-out adjective: something that could very easily be applied to any number of indie games that put a heavy focus on character, story, and a friendly or sometimes melancholy atmosphere. There have been a ton of clever, inviting indie games that have been released in the past decade, and an endless stream of them could use that forbidden adjective. Shovel Knight, Firewatch, Minecraft, Spelunky: the list goes on and on. “Charming” just sounds simultaneously lazy and condescending, and I’ve tried to avoid it.
But here today, I am forced to use that word when it comes to Owlboy. Because no other word encapsulates the feeling I get from D-Pad Studios’ indie platformer better than that troublesome little moniker, so let’s just get right into it, shall we?
Owlboy is charming.
I don’t mean that in the sense that it’s cute (even though it is). I don’t mean that in the sense that it’s witty (even though it is). I don’t mean that in the sense that it’s clean and neat in a precious little package with a precocious story and adorable characters (even though it is all of those things).
I mean that Owlboy charmed me. Owlboy dazzled me and flirted with me and made me feel like the only gamer in the whole world. I mean, this game did everything but take me out for a steak dinner and an evening of passionate, feathery love-making.
Owlboy was first dreamed up in 2007 by Simon Anderson, and he and his team at D-Pad Studios chiseled and coded and shined the hell out of each and every pixel of this game. Nine years later, Owlboy was released to the world.
And boy, does the effort of nearly a decade show.
Let’s start with the most obvious thing. Owlboy is stunning. Stunnnnning. If Shovel Knight’s concept was an amplified NES game, then Owlboy had the same thing in mind with the SNES generation. Everything about Owlboy is alive. Every leaf, every twitch of the eyebrow, every twiddle of the thumbs: it’s all animated in the most vibrant way that I have ever seen when it comes to pixel art.
The music is gorgeous as well, and those carefully crafted melodies combine with a meticulously created world to put you in the mindset of those grand adventures you used to go on with your SNES. I loaded up Owlboy for the first time and was immediately put in the mindset of classics like Chrono Trigger and Secret of Mana, despite the fact that those were RPGs and Owlboy is a Metroidvania-style platformer. These aspects all combined to force me into that adjective again: this game is just charming as hell.
The story is charming, as well. You play Otus, a mute Owl who lives in a floating city.. You’re disliked by the general populace, verbally abused by your mentor, and your only friend is a geeky engineer. It’s equal parts melancholy and adorable, and it all comes to a head when your home is attacked by a vicious band of robot pirates. You don’t have any real weapons to speak of, but by carrying various friends you meet along the way, you can take advantage of different abilities, from an exploding blunderbuss to a zap gun to sticky webs.
As you encounter and band together with your new friends, you’re able to uncover more and more of the map and slowly discover the truth of the pirates and who controls them.
It’s a story about friendship and overcoming adversity in a way that effectively tugs at the heartstrings while avoiding melodrama.
Having said that, the talkative storyline did pose a few issues as time went on. You see, Owlboy is a joy to play. The controls are smooth and fluid, and flying from one zone to another just feels terrific. But as you unravel the story, you find that you’re interrupted in those moments again and again. It didn’t irk me too much until it got to certain boss fights, where I found that I had to stop for dialogue and plot development at various points throughout the battle. Which was frustrating, because some of these boss fights required a few losses before you finally realized how to take them out.
But beyond a few button mashy moments like this one, Owlboy does not overstay its welcome.
The game lasts around 8 to 9 hours, and it makes for a seasoned blend of storytelling and the joy of exploration. A $25 price tag might be daunting to some for such a brief experience, but my time spent in the floating city with Owlboy was well worth it, if only to experience what will no doubt be a benchmark for 16 bit style pixel art for years to come.
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"Sneak A Little Drinky" written and performed by The Butterscotch Bros: Carlos Avendano and Dan Ross.