I spent about an hour absolutely in love with Endless Ocean Luminous. This is a game exclusively about swimming around and looking at cool fish, and that concept is downright joyful for the kind of person - like me - who grew up on Animal Planet and Shark Week programming. Unfortunately, the game's new roguelike structure makes the joy of discovery run out fast, and if you'll excuse what might be an obvious metaphor, this now literally endless ocean has the depth of a puddle.
I've spent several more hours with a review copy of Endless Ocean Luminous desperately trying to recapture that initial spark, but it just isn't here for me. The game's primary mode drops you into a procedurally generated chunk of ocean that you can search to your heart's content. The difference between this and a traditional roguelike is that you can't die - you just pick a new map whenever you get bored of exploring the current one.
But I've yet to find a map that's fun to explore. They're divided into big geographical blocks with extremely obvious boundaries, to the point where you'll literally find sheer cliff walls at 90 degree angles separating deep waters from the shallows. This is a game about exploring nature where the environments don't feel organic. There's no ecology here - no sense that the places you're diving have been forged by natural forces bumping up against each other.
I wish this ocean would end
That's especially noticeable when it comes to the wildlife, which essentially just patrol in circles without much regard for anything around them. That works well enough when it's just the colorful little fish swimming around the coral in the shallows, but it makes a lot less sense when you start to realize that you've never actually seen a shark eat any of the smaller schooling fish they're constantly swimming a few feet away from.
The promise inherent to roguelike-style procedural generation is that there will be endless content and variety in the places you can explore. The 'content' part is technically true here, but there's very little variety from map to map - at least, not in the few maps I've dived into. Every one I've seen has offered the same combination of shallows and ocean floor areas to explore, with only occasional variance in what the depths look like. I've seen the same lava flows multiple times over, but hey, at least one map broke up the grind with an area filled with ancient creatures. It wasn't any more interesting to explore, but at least it was different.
A certain amount of repetitiveness is inherent to procedural generation, but traditional roguelikes spice it up by building gameplay systems to challenge you in these endless environments. Endless Ocean Luminous steadfastly refuses to do that. It's a game about chill exploration, sure, but part of the thrill of charting the undersea world is that there's some danger there. Maybe you'll run out of oxygen, or maybe you'll run into a creature far in the depths that doesn't agree with your presence. There's none of that here. You can swim forever and even the supposedly deadly, mythical sharks you might find deep underwater won't even look twice at you.
Something fishy
There's technically a story mode that provides a bit more direction to your wanderings, but it's a separate mode that doesn't directly connect to whatever procedural map you're exploring. Each mission is a sort of vignette, selected from a menu screen, with a brief piece of exposition delivered by either an AI companion or a single other named character. I don't think I've played a single one that's lasted more than five minutes, and while the maps here appear to be bespoke they aren't any more detailed or believable than their procedural counterparts.
I don't know if the story mode gets any more involved deeper into the game, because later missions are gated by scanning fish in the main mode, and the requirements to progress are absurd. You will need to scan - which basically just entails holding a button and scanning your view over whatever you want to examine - thousands upon thousands of fish to progress the story mode.
At a certain point, I found myself swimming back and forth across each block of the map spending slow minutes carefully making sure I'd scanned each and every fish before moving on to the next block, because this was the most efficient way to play the game and keep unlocking more content.
I guess there's something appropriate about the idea of making Endless Ocean literally endless, but the end result proves that you can't just transplant roguelike-style procedural generation into any genre. Endless Ocean Luminous is caught in an awkward space between its resolute determination to be a chill exploration game and its desire to churn out infinite content, and that leaves us with an ocean's worth of dull, same-y environments that just aren't worth diving into.
The Switch got a much better classic comeback earlier this year, but Nintendo reviving a nearly 20-year-old Nintendo DS game is still wild.
