"As stated by the royal court due to recent plunders, all belongings of the deceased pilot are to be considered property of the local authorities."
When you first start playing Nauticrawl, you will be completely and immediately overwhelmed. This is by design. The cockpit that you occupy is full of levers, and clicky buttons, and pull cords, and none of them are labelled. You're expected to play around with them, hit switches until anything happens, and then inevitably get a game over for what seems like literally no reason. It is confusing, and it is unfair.
Eventually, you'll stumble your way into hitting the right switches. It doesn't take too long, but it stops just before your frustration can set in. The murky, bassy rush of water around your Nauticrawl gets interrupted by beeping monitors and rolling engines, and you can start to figure out what each of these individual pieces do as a whole. You'll continue to make mistakes that cost you the game; you'll ram into a wall and break critical systems, or get caught by a patrolling drone, or simply run out of gas and battery and leave yourself stranded on the sea floor, but each of these failures teaches you something new. You won't lose the same way twice, because you've learned the two things that make you lose: ignorance, and carelessness.
The Nauticrawl starts to feel like a second skin. You flick off monitors as you move, because you know where you're going to go before you take a step. You redirect battery power from the vestigial components you've identified. You know exactly how much time you've got to loot guard towers before the security drones spawn, and you know how to evade them if they do. Try as they might to stop you, the royal court doesn't stand a chance. You've figured out how to use their machinery better than they can.
The Nauticrawl turns from an oppressive, horrifying machine into a symbiotic tool. You take the vehicle that has been used to enslave you, and you turn it against the royals. You will walk through them. They have contented themselves with autonomous guards and slave labor, and, in doing so, have ensured that they will be usurped. The drones are easily outsmarted and outwitted; you carry the flame of a popular revolt. Those forced into Nauticrawls outnumber the members of the royal court.
There's a moment at the halfway point that I won't describe beyond the fact that you get access to additional tools, but they're responsible for blowing the entire world of the game wide open. It's the exact turning point where Nauticrawl turned from something I liked into something that I loved. This relies a little on some very forced contrivances for the player's sake, which seemed like a bit of a step down after all of the learning needed to get this far in the first place; it feels like a developer losing confidence in a player who, by getting this far, should already be trusted to figure things out by themselves.
This is a minor blemish on something that is otherwise so wonderful as a holistic experience. Nauticrawl is an unforgettable title that effortlessly forces to player to work through the confusion and persistence required to learn something without a manual better than any of its contemporaries have ever even attempted.
When you first start playing Nauticrawl, you will be completely and immediately overwhelmed. This is by design. The cockpit that you occupy is full of levers, and clicky buttons, and pull cords, and none of them are labelled. You're expected to play around with them, hit switches until anything happens, and then inevitably get a game over for what seems like literally no reason. It is confusing, and it is unfair.
Eventually, you'll stumble your way into hitting the right switches. It doesn't take too long, but it stops just before your frustration can set in. The murky, bassy rush of water around your Nauticrawl gets interrupted by beeping monitors and rolling engines, and you can start to figure out what each of these individual pieces do as a whole. You'll continue to make mistakes that cost you the game; you'll ram into a wall and break critical systems, or get caught by a patrolling drone, or simply run out of gas and battery and leave yourself stranded on the sea floor, but each of these failures teaches you something new. You won't lose the same way twice, because you've learned the two things that make you lose: ignorance, and carelessness.
The Nauticrawl starts to feel like a second skin. You flick off monitors as you move, because you know where you're going to go before you take a step. You redirect battery power from the vestigial components you've identified. You know exactly how much time you've got to loot guard towers before the security drones spawn, and you know how to evade them if they do. Try as they might to stop you, the royal court doesn't stand a chance. You've figured out how to use their machinery better than they can.
The Nauticrawl turns from an oppressive, horrifying machine into a symbiotic tool. You take the vehicle that has been used to enslave you, and you turn it against the royals. You will walk through them. They have contented themselves with autonomous guards and slave labor, and, in doing so, have ensured that they will be usurped. The drones are easily outsmarted and outwitted; you carry the flame of a popular revolt. Those forced into Nauticrawls outnumber the members of the royal court.
There's a moment at the halfway point that I won't describe beyond the fact that you get access to additional tools, but they're responsible for blowing the entire world of the game wide open. It's the exact turning point where Nauticrawl turned from something I liked into something that I loved. This relies a little on some very forced contrivances for the player's sake, which seemed like a bit of a step down after all of the learning needed to get this far in the first place; it feels like a developer losing confidence in a player who, by getting this far, should already be trusted to figure things out by themselves.
This is a minor blemish on something that is otherwise so wonderful as a holistic experience. Nauticrawl is an unforgettable title that effortlessly forces to player to work through the confusion and persistence required to learn something without a manual better than any of its contemporaries have ever even attempted.