Lately, I’ve been feeling that Dome Keeper itch… you know that feeling of playing a chill but deep sort of game much along the lines of that game but with a different take on it, in a way. I mean, sure, there’s Wall World but Wall World has its own issues, namely meta progression that is practically required in order to play the game and not just lose to a boss or whatever.
So, while browsing Steam, I found this game called “Ocean Keeper: Dome Survivor“, in my library it’s just called “Ocean Keeper” and on all the art for the game, it’s titled “Codename: Ocean Keeper”. It’s a bit odd but hey, sometimes you just have three different names, I guess.
Ocean Keeper is a game that released onto Steam into Early Access back in summer and I gave it a try more recently but ended up having mixed feelings about it. Hence, I’ll talk a bit about that today and hope that this a) works to inform others of what they’ll get into if they grab this game for themselves, and b) provides feedback to the developers as to what definitely needs to change in the game.
Developer: RetroStyle Games
Publisher: RetroStyle Games
Genre: Early Access, Indie, Top-Down Shooter Action Mining Roguelike
Release Date: July 19th, 2024
Reviewed on: PC
Available on: PC
Copy was purchased.
Before we talk about Ocean Keeper, let’s talk about its inspirations. For what it’s worth, this game is mainly inspired by two games, the aforementioned Dome Keeper as well as Wall World. In Dome Keeper, you land on an alien planet in search for an alien relic, mining resources by day and defending your dome against the hordes of aliens by night. In Wall World, you explore a wall and move around in your mech spider alongside that wall. Caves that you explore are finite, so you’ll have to keep going to find more resources for upgrades and you have to defend your mech spider or die trying.
If I had to say which games this was closer to, it would definitely be Wall World. This is fine, in and of itself, but I found it a bit jarring how little the game itself innovates.
Aside from the perspective being isometric when you defend against the enemies, this is practically just Wall World but in the ocean – which is fine in a way, of course. You look for caves to explore, mine resources, get upgrades, and then fight waves of enemies.
The combat itself feels pretty good initially. You’re in a mech spider and gun down enemies with a variety of weapons that you’ll have to unlock. You can find new weapons but are limited by how many you can equip at a time. This is where meta progressions comes in, letting you unlock more slots for weapons and abilities alike. It gets stale quickly though and no amount of permanent unlocks will fix that. It’s just “gun ’em down” or “gun ’em down but with an exclamation mark!” rather than actually having interesting weapons or anything…
That said, what I find interesting here is the variety of enemies available – from hordes of Zerg-like squishy enemies to angler fish that camouflage themselves on the ground or worms spitting acid at you from afar. There is a lot.
Furthermore, you have to deal with bosses. They don’t reward you with anything when you kill them but the bosses at least provide you with a good challenge and different attack patterns, although they also appear to love just spawning inside you and dealing damage that you cannot avoid. This is where meta progression comes in, letting you unlock better stats and a dodge and a shield and stuff. Things that should be in the game from the get-go, I’d imagine.
Inside the caves, you dive deeper into the scuffed-looking blocky mines and grab resources that you need to haul closer to the entrance. There are a few different resources available and any block harvested gives you meta currency – just like in Wall World. Like, straight up taken from there.
When I say that it looks “scuffed”, I mean that in a “it clashes with the art style in other areas” kind of way. I don’t mind Indie Games looking iffy here and there as long as they’re fun or good games but in this case, you’ve got the pretty mech-spider sequences in the overworld… and then you literally have to mine blocks inside the caves and your model just doesn’t look that interesting. Coherence would have been good there. Hence the scuff comment. Even pixel art would have been better probably, in my opinion.
Now, based on these features I’ve talked about already, some of you might think “weird, this sounds just like Wall World” and you’d be right. Wall World is an interesting one because it introduces lore into a Dome Keeper like experience and has definitely its own takes on the formula. Ocean Keeper doesn’t really do that. In fact, it has “Dome Survivor” in the title but you neither have to deal with Survival or any “Survivors-like” elements nor with a Dome. It feels like it’s setting the wrong expectations here. It just comes across as an amalgamation of inspirations with no soul of its own. And that’s rough.
Like, combat is mostly kiting and shooting a machine gun. The upgrades leave little to no player agency. You literally just upgrade your damage, health and whatever but there are no smart or interesting choices to make either right here. After your very first run, you realise all of a sudden that you’ve been struggling because the game expects you to grind literally any block to then buy upgrades to make your diver faster and your mech sturdier or to give you a dodge since dodging some boss attack patterns is practically impossible without some abilities. You just take the hits, I guess.
I now mentioned meta-progression thrice in this review because I dislike it just that much. The whole reason why meta progression exists in games is to stretch out content so that the player doesn’t get through it too quickly. In games like Hades it makes sense to do this. You nerf the player so that they have a hard time finishing the game which in turn enables to experience the story and get involved with the world and the various quests and elements. This, however, comes at the downside that people who don’t care about the narrative elements will feel annoyed at it.
As such, meta progression typically serves no purpose in games without a narrative like Ocean Keeper because it just is supposed to make you grind out runs and waste your time so that you can eventually enjoy the game properly.
Something Ocean Keeper supposedly has is ruins with puzzles and lore and whatnot but I haven’t encountered any in my playtime and looking at reviews on Steam, I also didn’t seem to find many others that were able to. Some experienced them, some didn’t, some found them boring, some liked them a lot. No idea.
Edit: I, since I wrote this, did encounter ruins twice in other runs, relatively early on, too, so there placement seems to be random-ish. The puzzles themselves are nothing major. Take note of coloured numbers, press a button, drop a block, link a coloured cable. If you’re colour-blind, you’ll hate these. They’re very simple but also you’ll have to keep defending against waves whenever the timer ticks over which is annoying.
It’s a cool idea probably but the map is huge, getting markers that show you which caves you’ve been to costs meta currency (why?) and with some procedural generation, it makes it at times difficult to get there.
All in all, I’d like to say that Ocean Keeper feels uninspired. It takes a lot of inspiration but it’s lacking the soul to stand on its own and do something different and unique and something that only RetroStyle Games could make. This game here is stylish, yeah, but not retro nor unique. I found it a bit jarring.
If you like meta progression, this game’s probably a good fit for you but personally, I value my time more, and I don’t want to grind out runs while being bored only to then eventually possibly be in a state as a player that was intended in the first place.
Not to mention that you can literally get all achievements for this in like less than an hour. It literally awards you with achievements for just playing the game rather than actually doing anything that would be an achievement.
As such, we can learn that apparently, according to the Global Achievements stats, only 20% of players have defeated 20 waves in total. Only 30% have defeated 10 waves in total. That’s a big drop off right there. Only 47% of players have completed 5 or more waves of enemies. You can get to ten or fifteen waves in a single run, btw. Of course, only 62.2% of players completed the mandatory tutorial, so chances are high that there’s nearly 40% of people who own this game that just haven’t played the game but that seems rough.
Achievements, and this is a huge pet peeve for me, need to give you a reward for going out of your way to do something. Think, for instance, dealing a billion damage in a single shot in Risk of Rain 2, landing the little drone in the Sun in Outer Wilds, beating a run in twenty minutes in Dome Keeper, et cetera. There are so many ways of doing it that provide fun meaningful challenges.
In Ocean Keeper, you cannot play the game without getting an achievement pop-up every two to five minutes. “Complete the (mandatory) tutorial!”, “Dig a single Copper Ore”, “Dig a handful of blocks!”, “kill enemies”, “get a relic”, “dig five copper”, “dig one iron”, ughhhhhhhh
I feel like Ocean Keeper: Dome Survivor has an identity crisis. It has “dome” in its name but there is no dome in the game… It has survivor in there but it doesn’t really do anything that is survivor-like. Even the “Keeper” in its name, doesn’t do much. You’re not taking care of the ocean. You’re destroying its fauna and exploiting its caves.
The gunplay is fun initially but wears out quickly, turning into quite a bit of a boring mess whereas the mining just feels janky, especially when abilities don’t recharge or don’t stop recharging or with you bouncing off edges and not actually mining the block at all.
So, yeah, I’m not a fan.
I’m not recommending this game. It feels uninspired and boring. The meta-progression made it worse for me and the achievement stuff is just so darn annoying, really. If you’re into all the things I disliked, go for it. But I can’t recommend it in its current state.
This post was originally written by Dan Dicere from Indiecator.
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