Owlboy tells the story of Otus, a mute owl that lives in the village of Vellie. The owls are a proud and ancient race in his world, but our hero feels depressed because he can’t fly very well and his inadequacy makes him very lonely and sad. The disappointment of his master adds to Otus’ feeling of not being good enough and his muteness, to his loneliness. The game begins in a sunny normal day, when a sky pirates’ attack prompts Otus and his friend into a journey to save the world. While it looks like a very generic underdog story, Owlboy presents a well crafted and, more importantly, highly functional story that is coherent with its themes.

The gorgeous hi-bit graphics and the nice story are accompanied by a very well done gameplay, which makes for an addictive (if somewhat short) experience. Owlboy is a surprisingly coherent thematic game, too, as both story and gameplay are centered between the two most important themes in the game: the strength of friendship and learning from failure.

The game was developed by D-Pad Studios and while it was released in 2016, development began in 2007. Simon Stafsnes Andersen, director of the project, stated that Owlboy was remade various times, as the developers were afraid that it wasn’t good enough and the fans, that were already expecting the game for a while, would be underwhelmed. They took their time, but the result is surely interesting.

Adapt or die (and then keep trying until you adapt)

The gameplay mechanics are Owlboy’s best features. Although it doesn’t look like it in the first hour of the game, that is pretty story-focused and will make you spend a long time watching conversations, Owlboy is not completely a story-focused platformer, but heavy gameplay centred one, so it fits that the game can be so fluid and play so well.

As Otus is an owl, you’ll spend most of the game flying, which gives a lot of mobility to explore and fight. Even if the game is a platformer, you won’t need to spend much time jumping, as most of the action will be found in shooting enemies and flying around dodging and looking for secret passages. The movement is very fluid, which helps to make the game run smoother.

Every companion that appear in your journey has a function and serves as an upgrade to your arsenal. Geedy, the geek from Vellie, shoots really fast and will be your primary way of offense during most of the time, while Alphonse, the honorable pirate, is a heavy shooter. His shots deal heavy damage, but he reloads very slowly, so you can’t use him as a primary offensive weapon. The third character to join you is less offensive, but can move you around really quickly, so he’ll be mostly a defensive and evasive aid. Another feature that helps in the fluidity of the game is the teleporter that you find in the beginning. It is an ancient owl relic that teleports your companions to you instantly, enabling you to change between them quickly, which adds a lot of speed to the game, something vital for it to play as well as it does.

One of the best things about Owlboy is that the game is never grindy or too long. You always have to use your head and adapt. That is mostly because of two elements, the enemies and the drastic changes the game forces you to do. There is a big variety of enemies and, while some of them are alike in appearance, all of them have different attacks and vulnerabilities. This isn’t a game in which you can just spam the shooting button and succeed. Sometimes you’ll have to slam the enemies or throw something at them. Other times, you can use them to your advantage, grabbing and throwing them to open your way or making them throw bombs or stones at things in the scenery. From beginning to end, you can’t just shoot. You have to figure strategies to defeat the new enemies, so you’ll have to learn their defenses, attacks and sometimes even their flying patterns.

The gameplay is essentially coherent to the game’s theme of “learning by failure”. You’ll probably fail and die a lot after the first half of the game, especially during the bosses, but if you are observant enough, you’ll soon learn their patterns and will triumph in no time. While I dislike dying to learn how to play as a general philosophy of game design, and I think that it hurts a bit the quality of the game that you have to die a lot, this feature is well implemented, especially in boss fights. The hardest fight in the game, against the pirate Dirk, is all about memorizing where he’ll fly in the screen and how to avoid his quick attacks. I died quite a few times there until I stopped screaming “this game sucks” and started paying attention to the patterns, which made the fight considerably easier.

When the game is not changing the enemies, he changes the conditions you’re in. At a point during the last third of the game, one of your party members leave the team for a while. The whole mechanics of the game are changed then. You face the same enemies, but you can’t hurt them in the same way, so you have to run or kill them using another friend. At the very end of the game, you can’t fly for some time. That completely subverts the gameplay. It turns the game into a classic platformer and you have to time and aim your jumps very well not to die.

There are checkpoints every couple of rooms apart and always before a boss, which is a bless. If you have to die a lot to learn how to play the game, it would be frustrating if a lot of backtracking was required. Unfortunately, a few sections of the game don’t have enough checkpoints, like the part where you can’t fly and have to jump through some floating stones near the end of the game. It is a long section without any checkpoints and it is very easy to die in the abysses, which will make you lose a lot of time.

The difficulty curve in Owlboy is mostly well done. During about the first third of the game, I almost never died, which made the game look too easy, but from there on, it had some really tough sections, especially the boss fights, which can be annoying near the end of the game (the last one is actually pretty easy, though). The best thing about the learning curve is that Owlboy doesn’t look like a 8-10 hour tutorial. You never feel like you are in a tutorial, but you are still learning during the whole journey, you just don’t feel like it because the ability to learn about the monsters and your surroundings is a vital ability and part of the gameplay.

Owlsthetics and design

Aesthetically, Owlboy is sublime. The “hi-bit” graphics offer a feeling of nostalgia for anyone who played SNES platformers back in the day, but with more detailed environments than in the in the 90s. The backgrounds are drawn with beautiful sprites and the floating isles really seem like an idyllic place. Owlboy is not only beautiful, though, but good at environmental storytelling too. The backgrounds often show pirate ships floating in the sky during attacks. During a brief part of the game that passes in the capital, you can see how huge and important the place is because of the background showing a major city and a war going on. In the last Owl Temple of the game, when the story heats up, the background literally does. The surroundings start to get dark and full of magma and it clearly looks as if danger is really close.

Owlboy’s design is praised in the internet commonly as an example of a Metroidvania game, but it has only light Metroidvania characteristics. While the game has an explorable scenario that opens up with time, secret rooms and you can use abilities that you receive during the game to open new ways, it is a very story-focused and linear game. It has plenty of space for freedom in combat and it clearly wants you to explore (it has coins that are hidden in the areas and can be exchanged later for new hats and upgrades in health or weaponry), but it is also more linear and focused than games like Super Metroid and Castlevania: Symphony of the Night.

The exploration of the world is made in a very simple way (although it can look more complex while you play). You start in an “open” small area in which you get to know Vellie, the first town of the game, and then proceed to the first dungeon, which is extremely linear, but has some secrets that reward exploration. After some time, you get to the game’s central hub: Tropos, that is “north” (up) from Vellie. There, you explore the world coming from the south in a clockwise fashion. First you explore a dungeon in the west of Tropos, then a huge area north and finally you use a secret passage in a more eastern section to get to the end of the game.

It is also interesting to note that Owlboy doesn’t have a map. This is a clear sign that exploration was only a feature in the game in certain areas like Vellie or Tropos. In the dungeons, exploration leads to secret passages with occasional treasure, but not secret open areas.

A Tale of Friendship and Failure

Owlboy is a story about two things: the strength of friendship and a journey in which both Otus and the player learn together by failing. Otus is the village loser in the start of the game. He’s an owl, a member of a very old and proud race and everything he does goes wrong. He feels as if everybody in Vellie hates him for his clumsiness and he doesn’t have many friends. His tutor is very harsh and always makes him feel bad about himself. One fine day, it’s Otus time to guard the city and he learns that a troublemaker is in town. He chases after him with Geedy, a geeky human that is his only friend. The sky pirates attack while he’s chasing the troublemaker in an old temple and everybody blames him for leaving his post.

The story is pretty common most of the time. Otus is our hero, an underdog that will face many perils to prove himself and become a real hero. It is a story we all have seen many times. The difference here is that the story gets better with the time and it is actually pretty well done. There are problems, though. Much of the story revolves around the ancient owl relics which the pirates are after and Otus and his friends actually succeed most of the time, but then things beyond their control go wrong and Otus can’t get his sense of accomplishment. For a game that is so much about failure, it would be better to see actual failure in most of those objectives instead of “failures” that only happen in the perception of others.

While the dialogue is nothing beyond average writing, the story is colored by some eventual cool characters like Bonanza, a badass old lady that explodes stuff and the Buccanary’s owner, a lady that really mistreats her poor… penguins (?) in a sadistic, but humorous, manner. These interesting little details pale in front of Owlboy’s best narrative feature, its thematic coherence that is perfectly meshed with gameplay. The story is all about how friendship and failure makes people stronger. Otus was the village loser in the start of the game, but with Geedy and Alphonse later, he rocks. He flies, explode monsters and almost save the day a ton of times. You don’t get new powers in Owlboy, you get new friends and learn how to play better.

By the end of the game, this friendship is developed as being the core of the story. Otus might not communicate and fly very well, but he has friends that risk their necks for him and that makes him stronger. Without his friends, he wouldn’t have made as far as he does. In fact, everybody that is ruthless and friendless is defeated. The apex of the friendship story is met at the end, when Otus’ friends help him save the world. A really interesting thing about the final boss fight is the convergence of story and gameplay around the theme of “friendship makes us stronger”. The final boss is using the relics and he is very powerful. You can only beat him when you disable all the three relics and you have to do this to each one using the powers of one of your three companions. If friendship is what made you strong, you can only beat the ultimate challenge with the help of all your friends.

At the end of the story, Otus, as you, learned much and has made friendships that literally saved the world. He failed a lot, but he didn’t give up and that made him better. The story might be simple, but it is highly functional. It is about something and make you part of it, as you don’t only watch the story unfold. You, together with Otus, learned how to survive in this world.