Developer: Carlos Coronado
Players: 1
Water is life, you'd be pretty dumb not to get that. But water also represents relaxation, wonder, entertainment and pleasure, oh, and death. My favourite recent holidays were massively improved in two very different ways, in a hot tub in the woods, floating in dark with the jets turned off, totally relaxed watching nature bumble past. And holidaying near a reef in the Med, snorkeling around peering at all the brightly-coloured fish and wondering what was under every rock or cranny, and what lurked deeper down.
Recreating that sense of wonder and relaxation in digital form is Koral from Carlos Coronado, using Unity to produce a wondrous, placid adventure through the threatened coral kingdom. It provides a little education, but also a gentle adventure all through the left stick, as you move an eddy or current across the seascape.
At every turn there's some magnificent creature rising from the deep or moving in from the distance as the game goes sea bananas with perspective tricks and parallax. Light and shade are everything under the surface and that too gets a strong workout as the current sends you deeper from time to time.
This review could have gotten angry with phrases like oceanic garbage patch, de-oxygenated dead zones and plastic hell. But the ambient atmosphere is calming and delightful as you move among the kelp, fish and other lifeforms, transporting plankton to corals to help open up the next area with sea caves (thankfully with no dead bodies, I know a guy with tales to tell!), shipwrecks and more to explore.
There's no player death to worry about, making it great for younger gamers, and the environmental message is subtle and measured, not hammered home. And the visual journey is augmented by some simple but impressive ambient work in the soundscape.
Further in, you need to flip coral switches to move rocks and solve some simple puzzles, but a little-back-and-forth aside, its all simple stuff. That said, Koral is not perfect, its quite a bit of money for not a lot of game. The bow-wave mechanic to get through phytoplankton blooms feels a bit icky, and while there's plenty of opportunity for hidden treasure (or knowledge) or anything, they aren't often taken up beyond a few perspective tricks that hide some of the polyps you need to pass through.
Those aside, there's something tranquil and enlightening here that makes it so much better than all those digital fish tanks and ocean screen savers - so well worth taking a swim with. And hopefully it'll teach us to be more respectful of our oceans and environment, let's see a Sony or Microsoft game sell that idea!
Score 3/5 (review code provided by @IndieGamerChick)
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