Ocean’s Heart Review

What is Ocean’s Heart a lovely action-adventure game made by a solo developer! It feels like a Zelda game and I enjoyed it so much. It has no missable achievements and takes about 10 to 14h to complete the game.

Approximate amount of time to 100%: 10-14h
Estimated achievement difficulty: 4/10
Minimum number of playthroughs needed: 1
Is there a good guide available: Yes, “Katharin” wrote a very nice walkthrough and an achievement guide. On astats you can find extra tips for “Fleet Feet” and “Fragile Flower”
Multiplayer achievements: No
Missable achievements: No
Grinding Achievements: No
DLC-Only achievements: No
Time-gated achievements: No
RNG-achievements: No
Does difficulty affect achievements: No difficulty option
Unobtainable/glitched achievements: No

Did I already state that this is such a lovely game? It feels like a Zelda game and I enjoyed it a lot. You start this adventure in your own small town. Your father asks you to get something from the secret hiding spot for the cafe you run as a family. From the moment you reach that secret hiding spot, everything goes downhill.. Your small town gets attacked by pirates and they kidnap your best friend. Your father is part of the volunteer navy and takes of rescuing your best friend. But what do you do if your father and best friend still haven’t returned after 6 months? You go on an amazing adventure trying to find them.

Very soon you get a lot of freedom to explore the world. To reach some places you might need new items, but you’ll find those during your journey. You also will find a lot of sidequests that are logged in a menu together with your main quests. Which keeps things organized. There is a very detailed walkthrough on the steam guide section, which you can use to help you find the way or give you a guideline, but without it, you’ll be fine as well. It is amazing that from the day of release this guide was available for those who enjoy having a helping hand.

This game has a few challenging achievements, but none are missable. At the release, the game had 1 missable achievement, but the developer felt that it was going against the spirit of the game to have that achievement and decided to delete it. Which is in my mind a very good choice. This way achievement hunters can just enjoy the game before having to focus on achievements. The few challenging ones are defeating the end boss with a curse that makes monsters a lot harder, you can do this after you’ve finished the game. Another is getting from point a to point b within a time limit and without using a fast travel system. And another one is getting from a different point a to point b without getting damaged or using the fast travel system. All are very doable. I only needed like 3 tries for the timed one to know the way and get it done. The others I got on the first try. Apart from those you have story-based achievements and achievements like getting all the different kinds of items, doing all the main and sidequests, stuff like that.

I really did enjoy this game and it is very hard to imagine that one person was able to make such a lovely game!

This review for Ocean’s Heart was written on 17 February 2021, based on the current Steam version of the game which has 21 achievements at the time of writing this review. This information can be outdated, for example, when the developer adds or removes achievements or releases (new) DLC.