Endless Ocean Luminous is the third game in a series I have never played, but that hasn’t mattered a bit. It’s a diving game and I can barely swim, but that hasn’t mattered a bit. It’s a game in which nothing much happens, and what does happen only happens very slowly. Don’t mind. It’s a game with a thirty-player multiplayer component, which is theoretically the big draw, but feels like the wrong way to play.
Endless Ocean LuminousPublisher: NintendoDeveloper: ArikaAvailability: Out 5th May on Switch.
All of this is to say: I’m not sure that Endless Ocean Luminous is particularly good – and I certainly wouldn’t want every game to be like this. But I’ve really enjoyed it so far.
This is a diving game. You’re deep beneath the oceans, wet-suited up, and you’re a scientist of some kind, which in this game means you point at fish. Fish come past? Point at them. Flock of fish in the distance? (Is flock the right term?) Point at them too. Point at big fish and small fish. Point at sharks and minnows. You get the idea.
By pointing at these fish, and holding down the L button as you do it, you’re scanning them. It’s quite cool. The individual fish are outlined in the UI and you get a bunch of light streaming off them which you can collect. This part – only this part – reminds me a bit of an action RPG where baddies scatter glowing plasma that you absorb, feeling all that XP goodness flow in as you do. In Endless Ocean Luminous, the more fish you point at allows you to open up new parts of the story, the chapters of which are all locked behind certain fish-pointing amounts. I thought the story was fine and kind of lovable in parts, but that wasn’t why I was pointing at the fish. Pointing at the fish is its own reward.
I’ll be honest: it’s become a bit of a groove I’ve settled into, or perhaps ‘strange middle-aged routine’ is more accurate than ‘groove’. Every night, I set aside thirty minutes for Endless Ocean Luminous, just to go in, splash around and point at fish, and I will probably continue to do this once I’ve finished writing about the game.