Kraken Odyssey (Switch)

Kraken Odyssey is a game that starts to crumble apart the longer you play it. While it looks at first like a simple platformer with a focus on clearing levels quickly, the more levels you play, the more you start noticing the game coming apart at the seams. In a bit of tragic twist though, the many errors and glitches could have been overlooked if only the game hadn’t demanded you engage with the level goals that initially seem optional, but if you want to actually beat this little platformer, you’re going to have to rub up against every little problem this gradually fracturing indie game exhibits.

Kraken Odyssey sees you playing as a four-legged octopus that can actually run around pretty well on land but will instantly die if he touches water. While the game uses absolutely no words to explain its plot or introduce its characters, this miniature kraken is referred to as Voulpy on its store page and his goal is to rescue his little brother after a large crab you’ll never see again kidnaps him. The game’s 32 level adventure ends with an anti-climax that doesn’t even whip up a second cutscene to resolve things, the credits not even playing as you’re left wondering if you’ve actually cleared the game at all.

The focus of Kraken Odyssey is on its 3D platforming though, most levels designed as a sort of sprint to level’s end with many meant to be completed in a minute or two once you know their layout. Your first time through will at least let you see levels have a bit of body to them, a few sections with obstacles to overcome and distinct ideas. While a good deal of them only really require you to use Voulpy’s ink-boosted double jump to navigate well, sometimes he’ll be able to pick up a TNT barrel he can use to blast away enemies with a slam or you’ll grab onto a seagull for a brief bit of flight. Avoiding enemy crabs, swinging axes, or falling totem poles ends up common but mixed up enough to help levels feel distinct, especially when things like falling snowballs, sliding walruses, and jellyfish barriers get thrown into the mix. Many levels do look alike beyond surface level things like the beach, snow, or lava castle aesthetics, but then you have occasional unique designs like a thorn maze that means, if all Kraken Odyssey was about was clearing these stages at your own pace, things would have been pretty decent if unexceptional.

It’s when extra level goals are layered over these stages that things start to fall apart. Every level in the game has a time limit you’ll need to hit to get a gold medal as well as three objectives to clear to earn stars. The medal system isn’t too bad, after you clear a stage you can often realize what parts can be skipped and which corners can be cut. There is a notable issue with mid-level checkpoints where sometimes it will throw you back to an earlier one with no clear reason though, and there is a level where if you try to replay it from the pause menu to better hone your time it will just crash the game outright. However, it’s the level objectives that really lead to problems. Many of them sound innocent on the surface, beat a level without killing any enemies, find all the gold coins, hit every ring during a seagull flying section, or don’t jump too many times are common ones. Few feel truly unique to a level, they are pretty much mixed and matched throughout with minor adjustments to the amounts. Every level also has two secret areas to find and sometimes the stage will make finding them an explicit goal while others simply track them for completion’s sake.

The way the objectives are integrated though can cause constant issues. The goal of not defeating enemies is sometimes complicated by the fact the game will get overzealous with magnetizing you to a foe when you try to jump over them. Other times you didn’t even visually land on them but the game still counts it as a kill. Rather strangely though, when a goal is instead to kill every enemy in the stage or collect all gold coins, the tally actually seems to fall short. You can end up killing only a few foes or collecting some of the coins and still finish that objective, although if the game simply removed the word “all” from the goal then maybe it wouldn’t feel so odd. The levels where you are trying to avoid jumps have a glitch in your favor though, that being if you die, it resets the jump count, allowing you to play a level normally jumping as much as you like and then die and finish the last section to clear that goal easily.

Things start to get even more rickety after you’re a few levels in. At first you can maybe clear the early levels and hit their goals and gold medal requirements well enough. Then though you’ll notice sometimes on the stage select screen it will grey out a level as if you didn’t unlock it but it is still playable. However it may also say you found a secret level already in a level you haven’t played, and greyed out levels won’t show your stars or medals so if you reach one of the progression gates you sometimes need to pick the level to even know how you did in it. The unlockable levels can sometimes lie about their requirements too but level 32 does require nearly everything in the game done properly to unlock, meaning those detection issues when jumping will become a source of frequent woe. Sometimes when you clear a level the results screen will only flash briefly so you might need to go to level select to even know if you cleared the goals too, making it even more unnecessarily difficult to track your progress.

Perhaps the nail in the game’s coffin though is the fact the back half is just a rehash of earlier levels with a few new elements added to each stage. This may not sound too bad, a level can feel a bit different with tougher enemies and a shift away from a beach to lava at least hides it some, but these levels start to go overboard on adding in some of the game’s worse hazards. Snowballs that fall from the sky or roll across the ground are incredibly prone to behaving randomly, something that does not gel at all with the sometimes tight medal requirements or goals that deliberately send you through tight spaces where you’re at risk of doing things like accidentally killing an enemy while trying to survive. Most medal requirements are a lost cause if you die during the level, so retries because the snowballs elected to land in a spot where you can’t flee quickly enough becomes a commonality in the late stages that don’t vary up their retreads in interesting ways. Even the final level is a rehash at parts, the game’s annoying approach to difficulty piling onto the frustrations you experienced with the goals you had to clear to get to the game’s weak conclusion.

A baffling extra element is added to Kraken Odyssey though in the form of unlockable hats. This is where you spend the gold coins you collect, but for them to appear in the shop, you must first earn credit towards the hat through end of level treasure chests. The treasure chest size is determined by the medal you earned, but the contents of the chest are random. Hats have different rarity levels, so you may only get a single credit towards a rare hat at the same time you also earn four credits towards a common one. This wouldn’t be so bad if not for the fact these can be repeats, even for hats you already unlocked and bought, and since you at least need a silver medal to get any hat credit at all, Kraken Odyssey is trying to incentivize you to replay old levels purely for the pursuit of random hat drops. Hats and alternate looks do not impact how the game plays and even clearing every level and every goal with a gold medal will still likely leave you with plenty of hats not even close to unlocking. There is a very week daily challenge that basically just has you replay a normal level but with higher rewards but even it isn’t enough to put a dent in this system, a gold coin hoard inevitable as you can’t hope to unlock hats swiftly enough to spend those coins at a reasonable pace. If it had been paced to unlock over the course of the adventure at least it would be a nice occasional reward, but instead it’s another flawed system in a shoddy game full of poor ideas.

THE VERDICT: Kraken Odyssey could have been a mediocre but passable speedy platformer helped along a bit by the level goals for those interested in something more, but its implementation of even simple elements is so incredibly messy it makes for a frustrating experience that ends up difficult at times for the wrong reasons. Objectives can either detect your actions poorly or have strange workarounds while random elements like falling snowballs can completely upend an otherwise perfect run, and then actual technical issues like game crashes and poor information displays only drag out what could have been a speedy albeit plain adventure.

And so, I give Kraken Odyssey for Nintendo Switch…

A TERRIBLE rating. After a few early stages of being okay, Kraken Odyssey plummets as you start to notice the holes in its design or rub up against the ways they impede you. Had the game never barred your progress you could at least soldier on through it ignoring the ways level goals and medal requirements are messed up by poor level layouts or technical problems, but Kraken Odyssey demands you pay attention to its extra objectives and the game goes from tolerable and forgettable to a string of annoyances and hollow victories. The hat rewards feel like something conceived of for a mobile game with infinite replayability but instead here they ask you to rub up against levels that already have whole chunks recycled elsewhere to pad the poor offerings and the odd daily challenge mode feels tacked on because it doesn’t pay out in a meaningful way or alter things much. Kraken Odyssey was clearly cobbled together too quickly without much oversight on what actually works, the game likely hoping players will overlook the myriad of issues simply because the platforming is passable when viewed interdependently of the detrimental complications. If everything worked as intended though there are still bad design choices in the back half, Kraken Odyssey one of the rare games where the basic early levels are probably the best mainly because they don’t have the failure points that become common later down the line.

I am surprised Kraken Odyssey is available on a physical cartridge and the version I played is even one that’s been updated presumably to address some of its issues. This feels like the rough kind of indie game you find in the depths of a digital storefront, something an amateur made while learning game design and threw out there despite knowing its flaws. It has a proper publisher through Maximum Entertainment, but it seems for whatever reason quality wasn’t a priority in Kraken Odyssey.