“Our kingdom was once engulfed in a never-ending conflict. We shook the very foundations of the world to end it, unaware of the consequences it would cause. Yet we had to move on. We had to rebuild. We had to forget.
“Join our unlikely protagonists in their adventure. Nameless girl seeking to traverse across the kingdoms. A survivor driven by guilt. A noble with too much to prove. Their paths will cross and, perhaps, so will their goals.
So begins the game of Sunken Sky a game by Codenightly, which appear to fall into one of those labours of love, where coding was interspersed with lots of coffee, followed by more coding and art work then a break for coffee. We’re thrown into an unfamiliar land with no idea of either our name, intentions or goals. Which seems to be the norm for when a hero is about to set off on a huge adventure.
I’m strongly reminded for some reason of Breath of Fire IV as Sunken Sky is giving off the same kind of animation style and the game is striving for a narrative action based experience. With the delightful artwork that sets an intriguing tone, I’ll admit that for the first part of the game, I was invested in seeing where things were going for the Nameless protagonists.
Sunken Sky should be my jam. It should also be my bread and butter for the next three months. After stepping off the Clair Obscur wonder train and then falling frustratingly in like with Hollow Knight, more of the same seems to be exactly what the doctor ordered. The hype and the press releases suggest as much and so I’m standing here with an empty bowl, spoon in hand, waiting hungrily to tuck in. Unfortunately, after some time with Sunken Sky, I’m still hungry and I’m slightly frustrated.
It all starts off very well. The tutorial section gives a decent hand holding on how to get the basics right and while it takes a while to grasp the controls, then it isn’t long before you are jumping around and learning the basics before you switch to other characters with differing powers. There’s a water colour vibe to the art which I instantly fell in like with and the characters have their own individual personalities. It’s not long before you’ll find yourself exploring a village and chatting with the occupants there, filling in the smallest parts of the background of the story. I’m expecting good things, and then it starts to fall apart a bit.
Hollow Knight honed the balance between exploration, battle and precision jumping. The achievement of their three person team can’t really be diminished. What it did was to set a huge bar for anyone stepping up afterwards with a similar kind of game. Regardless of whether you are purposefully trying to sail on their successful thermals, there’s a minimum that most people will expect, compare with and criticise if you fall short. Even in the base level of comparisons, there are things that you need to get right, and stick the landing on. Hollow Knight is tough, but fun. there were parts where you felt things could have been fairer, but it mostly seemed to be the case that you would see yourself through to the other side.
Sunken Sky seems to want to exist in a world where Hollow Knight has never existed, and neither has every single game that came after it. Heck, I would argue that it does a good job of ignoring some of the basic rules of very good games that have come before it. Super Metroid was doing this stuff back in 1994. Sunken Sky seems to think opinion is divided.
Jumping feels very random, like to the point where you can make several jumps in the same spot using what you feel is the same kind of button press and seem to get differing results. A jumping challenge should be about making a challenge around jumping not making the challenge be the actual jumping itself. Also double jumping is a standard double button press, anything else just doesn’t fit in unless I’m tossing out year of muscle memory here.
Outside the first village is a section where you are tasked with jumping up some disappearing clouds, but you’re pressing one button to jump and then a second button to dash, and your height of your jump never seems to be consistent and so you’ll miss the second part of the jump more often than not. You feel lucky when you land a basic jump, rather than outright expecting it to be a minimal norm in a platform jumping game. Celeste has been doing this for years now but Sunken Sky is ignoring this to make you frustrated instead of excited to get to the next area.
You don’t seem to be able to attack enemies unless you’re on the ground when you do so, and you certainly don’t seem to be able to do it mid jump. It means that more often than not your trying to balance up a handling the poor jump mechanic to dodge an attack from an enemy that then requires you to dodge, and then swing and attack. Sometime you feel like you can dash through enemies without any damage, but you won’t know this because Sunken Sky has decided that their game should have absolutely no feedback when you take damage. There’s no rumble, bounce back, noise indication and no invincibility frames to speak of. You’ll jump on to a ledge to fight an enemy, and they’ll swing at you and you won’t know if you’ve successfully dodged. More often than not, you end up back at the save point tree which are dotted about the map. I don’t remember ever playing a game in recent memory where your life hearts depleted and the game gave some indication it was happening.
I’ve really struggled to keep interest in a game that wasn’t really interested to providing some minimum standards as a player. There’s been too many times I sat down, booted up Sunken Sky, to be faced with the same impending dread that I knew I was going to be frustrated no matter how lovely the game looked. So unfortunately I gave up on Sunken sky because while it held the promise, while it was attempting to weave its own world, it seemed to spend more time on world building that moving around in that world. Sadly, this will Sunk without a trace from my collection. I’ve got a raft of games in my collection that do this so much better, one of them being 32 years older. Shame really, as this could have been something to waste some precious game time on.
The views in this article are based on a version of the game provided to us by the designer and publisher. This version may be a demo, prelaunch or similar. We were not paid monetary compensation for this article. We give a general overview of the gameplay and so not all of the mechanical aspects of the game may be mentioned. Videogames are strange because the act of playing them will often cement if you want to keep playing them further. So we normally give a video game the benefit of the doubt and keep playing until we get an idea of what the game offers. Some games will not require a huge written piece to describe what they do and how they made us feel about them. We understand that behind every game is someone who has dedicated time, effort and money and so we'll often tell you about things that didn't gel with us instead of trashing someone's hard work. We hope this write up gives you an idea of whether or not this is something that you will consider playing or even add to your collection. Even if we don't like something, hopefully it helps you to decide if it is something that you should find out more about. We always suggest you check out a gameplay video to give you a better understanding of the game as it is played. If you would like to support more content on the blog then please consider backing us on Patreon. www.patreon.com/werenotwizards
