Lou’s Lagoon PS5 Review. Developer Tiny Roar started as a couple of friends coming together to make games. After a while, it soon became a close-knit development team of 25 people. In that time, this team has developed a handful of games and have recently added Lou’s Lagoon to their resume. While Tiny Roar’s latest effort may have its fair share of problems, it still makes for a chill and fun crafting and gathering game.
Lou’s Lagoon Review (PS5) – A Fun Little Craftathon Despite Its Shortcomings
Making A Name for Yourself
A terrible storm has torn through Lou’s Lagoon, stranding many people in the archipelago and damaging a great deal of the infrastructure. What’s worse is that the best pilot in the Lagoon, Lou, has disappeared. You, as Lou’s apprentice, must try to find Lou while helping get things cleaned up and repaired along the way. Lou’s Lagoon takes a lot of inspiration from a lot of games to create its own concept. If you combined the world building of Jak and Daxter with the Sheepinator from Ratchet and Clank and then added in simplistic crafting, you would have Lou’s Lagoon. More on crafting in a minute.
The game consists of four zones where you explore, gather materials, and complete quests. No matter where I went, I felt like I was playing in a Jak and Daxter game, which made the whole experience all the more charming. To boot, your character cannot take damage, meaning that there are no consequences to getting hit or falling from high heights. The game wants you to explore and interact with things around you.
Much of your time is spent navigating the maps and collecting materials using your Swirler. The Swirler acts as a large vacuum that picks up everything you need to pick up. It also acts as your means of interacting with broken objects that need repairing. The Swirler applies the materials from your inventory to the broken object and it automatically gets repaired. With that said, you need to upgrade the Swirler in order to interact with heavier things, like derooting large vegetables or mining ores.
Build Your Way Up
The same goes for the other gadgets you craft. Each new zone requires you to craft a new gadget in order to completely traverse the zone. You can also upgrade each gadget to do more or run longer, i.e. upgrading the Glider so you can glide for a longer duration. It’s in these early roadblocks where the game sets the expectation for the rest of the game: craft in order to progress.
In order to craft most things, you need skill points. These come from quests sprinkled all across the map. These work mostly like fetch quests. If you’re like me and just like to go off checking things out and collecting everything you see, then many of these quests can be automatically completed because you already have the items in your inventory. The rest of the quests need you to begin the quest before you can interact with the objective.
Crafting is at the heart of Lou’s Lagoon, with everything centralized around Lou’s Lagoon. You reach the other areas by plane, which allows you to fly around in a rather large open area. Here, you find tons of different resources either in the air or on the water that you can gather up. This makes gathering materials much quicker than trying to run around maps to farm large amounts of them.
A Few Shortcomings
With that said, inventory space is limited but not when it comes to weight. Instead, inventory is limited by the amount of unique items you can hold. Theoretically, you can hold a count of 99 of any one item, and that only takes up one slot. However, in the beginning you can only hold 12 unique items at a time. This forces you to either sell your items or craft a bunch of things to consolidate your goods.
The game does a couple of things to deal with this limitation. By the end of the game, your inventory opens up to 30 slots. You also get access to some inventory space in your plane. The other is that you can sell any goods to the local vendor with the ability to buy it back from said vendor at a slight loss. Personally, I would rather have some sort of storage box. Considering all of the other things the game allows you to craft, crafting a storage box would eliminate the potential need to buy and sell goods at a loss just so you can pick up new items.
Also, after the first hour or so, you mostly get left to your own devices to figure things out, occasionally getting some guidance from NPCs along the way. The gameplay look isn’t challenging, but the nuances of crafting can cause some growing pains. One in particular that kept catching me off guard is needing to pick up items I’ve crafted. Items appear on the ground next to the device you use to craft said items. It also can take a couple of minutes to craft the items you need to make a new gadget or mission-based apparatus. Thankfully, you can start the crafting and walk away while it gets built. With that said, that fact isn’t super apparent without some trial and error. Crafting takes time, and for the first while I thought I had to sit at the menu and let the items get crafted. Things got more streamlined for me after I figured that out.
Finally, the game runs well for the most part. However, it seems to lack some optimization. In many different places, there are screen tears and sudden studders in frame rate. All in all, though, these graphical oddities don’t break immersion at all. Considering the casual nature of the game, the minor technical issues don’t take away from the chill presentation that the game wants you to experience.
A Fun Little Island Adventure
All in all, Lou’s Lagoon is a fun excursion that brings together many elements from early PS2 platformers into one engaging craftathon. With that said, the focus on crafting comes with its own limitations, particularly inventory management and lack of explanation. If you know about some of the nuances ahead of time, Lou’s Lagoon is a fabulous little romp.
Review code kindly provided by publisher