Your father sends you to get whiskey in a secret storage cave, and no sooner do you return than pirates have attacked your home village and kidnapped your best friend. A search party is sent out but never returns. So protagonist Tilia sets out herself to find her friend and her missing father.
The trail leads across an island kingdom presented in 16-bit style with small villages, harbors, and a lot of wilderness, in which Tilia not only has to deal with buccaneers but also with many other dangers - from aggressive bugs and bats to ravenous plants and worms to nasty traps and seemingly invulnerable golems.
If you only have a sword to defend yourself at the beginning, you can later also use bows, boomerangs, and other long-range weapons, plant bombs, or cast magic - a shield, however, is denied you. The handling is simple, but the execution is often a bit awkward due to the meticulous collision detection. If you're not exactly in front of an object, you can't pick it up, push it or activate it - and if you even get too close to a precipice, you'll fall to your doom.
The partly double key assignment also causes unnecessary annoyances: There you just want to address someone or pick something up and instead, you do a roll and fall into an abyss or into the water, which both costs health and in the worst case even your life. At least you are revived any number of times at the last invisible checkpoint only slightly battered. But some fights and balancing acts cost far more nerves than they actually should.
Orientation and navigation are also made unnecessarily difficult: Instead of detailed area maps, there is only a very rough world map and instead of practical quick travel points, there are only a few time-saving ship connections. Even the difficulty level can't simply be adjusted freely, but only increased at a certain location by ringing bells, which is at least original, though.
The dialogues are also often wonderfully quirky and self-deprecating: for example, if you talk to a sailor carrying crates in an endless loop, he confesses that he has completely forgotten what he wanted with the crate, while another wonders about crates full of goods that shouldn't even exist here. I also liked the quest and level design. Everywhere you can discover charming details as well as hidden paths and treasures.
CONCLUSION
Ocean's Heart is a charming pixel-art adventure in classic Zelda style that will make Link fans with a 16-bit penchant reminisce. Using sword, boomerang, and bow, you chase a band of pirates responsible for the disappearance of your father and girlfriend through a 2D world with lovely detail and exploration appeal. Quest and puzzle design as well as the often humorous dialogues are also appealing. However, the controls and collision detection are sometimes a bit clumsy, and the map and quick travel functions are very limited so that navigation and orientation are sometimes unnecessarily difficult. Fans of classic Zelda adventures should give this nostalgia trip a chance.
