BIG Festival Preview – The Coral Cave

One of BIG Festival’s biggest surprises for me was The Coral Cave , and by this I don’t mean that it was the most innovative or attractive game I played.

, and by this I don’t mean that it was the most innovative or attractive game I played. Instead, it presented me a game themed around Japanese culture in development by a French studio called Atelier Sentô. The team’s mastery of using Japanese elements in the game combined with the intriguing story really caught my eye.

The Coral Cave is a 2D point-and-click adventure about Mizuka, a little Japanese girl who lives on a small island and has to save her village from evil spirits. The player’s role in the Demo version I played is to help her get inside the coral cave itself, which seems to be a portal to a spirit world where she can acquire the aid of a good spirit and thus save the village. To be honest, I wasn’t initially very motivated by the story. I felt like I was thrown in the middle of the whole plot, not at the beginning. I felt the need to watch the introductory cutscenes before starting to play the game, which still didn’t quite fit together once the demo jumped into the gameplay.

Besides this, the developers seemed very committed to make an artwork according to Japanese traditions. The whole game is painted with vivid watercolor and hand-animated on paper. As a result, the animation work is already fluid and pleasant to the eye, which is not always easy to do when dealing with paper. The soundtrack also fits perfectly into the theme and is composed of traditional sounding, soft tracks that would believably originate from Japan, setting a very relaxing mood that matches with the visual artwork. Last but not least, all the voice overs are in Japanese, as expected from such am authentic work.

I went through a single puzzle during the demo. This puzzle was really hard and there was no way to get clues on what I should do, making it a matter of trial and error, which I really dislike since it doesn’t incentivize real thinking or logic. It took me some time to understand what I should do, and what fitting the corals I collected and placed on a plate would do, and after that it took even longer to discover the right way to fit them. As said before, the art and songs set a very relaxing mood to the game, yet trying to solve the puzzle got me stressed, so there’s currently a bit of disparity there. It seems like a guide or tutorial could be inserted to better serve gamers.

The Coral Cave seems to be somewhere between point-and-click adventures and other puzzle adventure games, like the Professor Layton series, so some explanation and tips would be welcome. The logic behind point-and-click games and puzzle games is different, and so are their elements, thus any kind of hint system – as minimal as it might be – would be great for making the first contact less frustrating. In general, The Coral Cave has potential that I’d like to see the development team fully realize. Besides the intended launch platform of PC, there is currently no other information regarding a release date or availability. Those interested can find out more about it on the game’s website.

You can also sit back and check our other BIG Festival’s previews.