Incredible vibe game, and one that manages to create this feeling through the bits of imprecision and loss of control, rather than being a seamless, effortless experience to get anything done. You'll frequently find yourself drifting off course regardless of how well you do, with progress often backsliding thanks to the ever changing winds, but this works in the game's favour once you allow yourself to just, abandon the concept of actually trying to win in favour of taking in the atmosphere. Kaze no Notam makes slight setbacks inevitable, and it gives a sense of your movements being dictated by the whims of nature, which rapidly dissolves from a point of irritation into reinforcing the that you need to just accept where the game takes you and take in your surroundings instead, you can't do anything to fix the situation currently, so you might as well make the best of it. The objectives the game gives you just exist to facilitate some very loose sense of direction, but aren't really something that feel like anything more than a secondary element to go alongside the main appeal of getting players to chill out in a balloon, peacefully being separated from the world below. Utterly gorgeous game that encapsulates my favourite elements of the PSX aesthetic better than almost anything else.

"These bitches gay"
- Repetitive and obvious
- Spoils the normal ending
- Pushes casuals away from the game

"If you 1cc they kiss I think..."
- Creative and unexpected
- Gives a possible hint of what's to come from the true ending
- Incentivize casuals to attempt a 1cc

I know this game is mostly joke, but there is no other game I've had such an emotional connection with something entirely virtual before, and it's embarrassing to say it's one of the few games to make me ugly cry. You can laugh, but Seaman is a video game that means everything to me.

Seaman talks with you about life & death, religion & cultural traditions, and the past & the future. Seaman is a pet that you start from raising as an egg until it decides it is ready to venture out into its own world, thanking you for helping raise itself to peak mental and physical strength (or at least in my ending). You grow very close with Seaman, especially after having the conversations you do with it. It starts simple, especially when still in it's baby stage, but eventually your daily conversations with Seaman start focusing around the health of loved ones around you, how aging and death is inevitable, and eventually Seaman starts to question it's own morality. Seaman begins to wonder if it's real or just a part of my experience. If it will ever experience love and loss, or if it's just supposed to fulfill whatever it needs for my virtual pet experience. It's very eerie.

Seaman also just has a very fascinating look at technology. It talks a lot about how it feels computers will make our lives overall more sedentary, and how eventually we probably will never need to leave our homes because we can just work, socialize, and commerce with the computer. For being a game from 1999, it’s crazy how much it was able to predict aspects of not just a post-online world, but a post-covid lock-down internet world.

Seaman is memed a lot, and I don’t blame people, I mean the creator put his own goddamn face on a fish (and the insects you feed it, too!!), but just because you can find small humor and oddities in the challenge that life brings doesn’t take away the impact it still has.

I loved my Seaman. It’s something I think about weekly, wondering how it’s doing out in its virtual world outside the box I raised it in. Seaman is not real, but the impact it left on me certainly was, and I’ll never forget it.

4.5/5

shelving this indefinitely because it's very genius but doesn't click too well as a puzzle game for me. got up to The Great Tower and called it there.
for as simple as the systems on display here are, I don't think I can internalize them well enough to inherently know why I need to do what I need to do. only a few times did I feel like I was actually solving a puzzle instead of brute-forcing my way through all of the wrong solutions, and not once could I look at the start of a puzzle and understand how certain moves would result in it becoming solved. maybe this is a classic "I'm just too dumb to get it," but I felt too dissatisfied after solving puzzles to want to push forward any more.