Sea of Remnants is the sort of game that straddles a middle ground it seems impossible to straddle. Imagine, if you will, a puppet, a wooden boy given life, but imbued with the kind of off-the-wall energy usually reserved for KPop acts, all dazzling neon lights and effortless spectacle. Now plonk him on a pirate island in the middle of a fantasy sea, give him a crew seemingly assembled from random parts, and send him on an adventure. That’s Sea of Remnants in a nutshell, and it’s really, really quite fun.
Slowly but surely NetEase is building a monopoly on consumer-friendly free-to-play adventure games. Last year’s Where Winds Meet is a great example of a game that requires little of you but time and grind in order to see all of it, offering only skippable cosmetics as microtransactions. Sea of Remnants has a similar template, but plays more like a single player Sea of Thieves. Only you’re all made of wood.
You are Puppetfolk, you see, literally living dolls for reasons I can’t fathom at this point. Your created character washes ashore with a nameless blonde companion, and are rescued by a kindly watchmaker. Before long you’re engaged in a tutorial to learn the various moves at your disposal, before a ridiculously over-the-top title sequence cements Sea of Remnants as a game that’s out for a good time. It also introduces R.S (which may be a placeholder name, as there were plenty of other temporary assets in the build I played), who happens to be a dead ringer for the girl you washed up with.
What follows is a descent into canary yellow and magenta madness, as you set out to secure a ship and a crew – neither of which was difficult in the playtest. My crew simply assembled out of nowhere once I had a ship, and I was able to select a party of four each time I made landfall to explore.
The game takes place across a series of islands in a distinctly Caribbean-flavoured world, and features all the stuff you’d expect from arm-wrestling challenges and hidden treasure chests, to ship-to-ship battles and wall-to-wall scallywags. The actual ship combat itself is pretty rough at this point, and needs some serious refinement before the eventual release, but I only had to take part in it a few times. Once against a giant, pissed off monkey, naturally.
Normal combat, however, surprised me, because while you can swing your sword around and break crates and hurt wandering wild boars and giant crabs, the proper combat is turn-based, and sees your crew line up to face down the enemy. As part of the lengthy tutorial, you’re taught the basics, including how to use special attacks and build up an Ultimate meter, which you can then cast at any time whether it’s your turn or not, and you’ll just automatically use it the next time there’s a break in the fight. You can opt to boost your damage by rolling up to 3 dice for a bit of bonus clout for certain attacks too.
These Ultimates, of course, are incredibly anime in their approach, seeing R.S, for example, whip out a mini shoulder-mounted rocket launcher to shoot at the enemy. For a simple combat system, it’s pretty satisfying, as is the exploration, which often turns up hidden booty or simple environmental puzzles.
I’m not sure how the multiplayer will work, though I’m assured there will be an element of co-op to the finished game. At present I only saw messages from other players stuffed into floating bottles like you’d find in Dark Souls, so maybe it’ll be more of a shared-world situation.
Being out on the sea is unsurprisingly liberating, but there’s a lot to be said for getting on dry land and heading off to explore. Despite there being quite a lot to get at in this early build, I’m left with many, many questions. For now, I can say that Sea of Remnants is shaping up to be very weird and a lot of fun, with a gorgeous, colourful art style, cool combat, and a boat-load of energy.
Sea of Remnants is coming to PC (via Steam), Xbox, and PS5.
