The Legend of Indie Game: Homage's Awakening
Oceanhorn is certainly a Zelda clone -- there's no doubt about that. But it's not quite the clone you might assume at first glance. While Oceanhorn immediately evokes the design and aesthetics of Wind Waker, it actually plays out much more like Link's Awakening with an island-hopping twist.
The story is eerie and curious (up until the explanation-heavy ending). The mechanics are two-dimensional, plus some terrain elevation. You can equip one item at a time -- one of which allows you to jump, basically. Not to mention heart containers, a magic meter, small keys and boss keys, sword and shield, yadda yadda yadda. Oceanhorn does a really admirable job of emulating some of the best parts of a Zelda game, even if it's fairly short by comparison.
Which makes it both baffling and disappointing when Oceanhorn does something really, really wrong. Like extremely heavy auto-aim on ranged items, making it practically impossible to target the right thing in tight quarters. Or bombable walls and obstacles that have no visual indication they're bombable, other than being in a suspicious dead end. Or the great sea, on which you merely choose your island destination and play a brief on-rails shooting game to sail there.
But Oceanhorn's highest crimes are, unfortunately, technical. I suffered very frequent graphical glitches, with terrain and enemies and the protagonist disappearing altogether, requiring me to flip switches in the graphics options just to reset rendering state. The game is capable of switching so rapidly between beautiful and unplayable, it's just ... frustrating. And while there were only a couple of boss fights where the over-the-shoulder camera (as opposed to its normal isometric 3/4 view) got stuck in the map, it got stuck a lot.
Oceanhorn is a great idea, with some cool execution, tragically marred by some glaring faults. What it does well is worth playing, but not really worth suffering through the entire game for.
Better than: Evoland (particularly the Zelda-like parts of Evoland)
Not as good as: Ittle Dew
Hard to say between this and: Anodyne
Progress: Completed the story, 79% items