Sea of Solitude Reviews
It's hard to call Sea of Solitude a bad experience, but it feels very pedestrian at almost every turn. Bland gameplay means you'll rarely be doing anything too exciting, in turn making the short run time all the more suspect. Beautiful visuals and themes that may resonate with some are minor highlights, although they're not enough to make up for insipidity.
The attempt to copy the works of Team ICO was not successful, as well as the desire of the creator of Sea of Solitude to reveal a personal drama. Probably, Geppert chose the wrong format, but this does not make it easier for us.
Review in Russian | Read full review
On paper, Sea of Solitude is an interesting and introspective story about Kay, a young and lone girl in the throes of depression. But despite many efforts to make us feel for the poor girl, the EA Originals game suffers from way too many draft collisions, and a poor acting that do not tribune an obvious and tearful story.
Review in French | Read full review
Kay battles alone, and I just really wish the game allowed her story to be told a little more delicately, with more emotion and less force.
Not even striking art direction and sincere storytelling can save the unfortunate nature of Sea of Solitude. Marred by dull action and, at worst, frustrating sequences, Sea of Solitude ends up feeling like twice the length of its runtime. Those monsters and that world sure are gorgeous though.
Its repetitive tasks are like the usual arbitrary gates to reach a cutscene in a mediocre video game.
Whether in respect of its derivative gameplay structure or the bumper-sticker approach to an otherwise-sincere message, it doesn’t go any deeper than the wading pool.
The simplistic gameplay could have carried the sloppy story if it was more polished. Animation breaks and the bugginess of the collision happen far too frequently in such a short game. If Sea of Solitude: The Director’s Cut was marketed as a satire of pretentious, arty, non-engagement style indie games, it would probably fool everyone.
A brief, frequently beautiful meditation on mental illness that can be overly blunt in its messaging.
It’s not necessarily a game I ‘enjoyed’ or I ‘disliked’. It’s an experience I partly shared in. In some of its moments, a connection was formed. It even became somewhat therapeutic for me too.
Sea of Solitude's lack of coherence and focus in the story, coupled with its simplistic gameplay, leaves the feeling of a rather shallow experience.
Review in Greek | Read full review
For me, the story worked best when it wasn’t so loud and so blunt.
At the heart of Sea Of Solitude is the idea that all emotions can have a positive or negative form — love can be twisted to be something unhealthy or saddening, for example, just as being alone can be quiet solitude or debilitating loneliness.
If it isn’t obvious already, SOS may not have the challenges of wide open worlds like the Witcher series, but it does everything it set out to do and it did it with flying colors.
