Loddlenaut - Racclog #4
Gaming is hard work. No, really! Most of the time I’m playing games on my PC at my desk, the very same spot I find myself when writing scripts, editing videos, working on Clone Hero charts and so on. Sometimes, playing games at my desk is a tall order, depending on what kind of game it is - sure, I’m usually happy to sit down and spend an hour or two playing a big chunky story-rich game or whatever racing game is filling the void between other games and tasks, but sometimes firing up a game can feel like a chore, let alone a smaller indie title that I might only want to play in 20-30 minute bursts.
That’s why I’ve been so excited to finally have a Steam Deck of my own. Playing games at my desk feels like work sometimes, but firing up my Deck and flopping down on my bed or curling up into a pasty white ball on the couch for short periods of time sounds not only unfathomably comfy and cozy, but a sure-fire way to finally chip away at my backlog, knocking out games that I probably wouldn’t have blinked twice at on PC. Just a little half an hour session every now and then, I would imagine to myself. Just a quick sesh in-between other things.
Anyway I played the entirety of Loddlenaut within a 26-hour timespan yesterday. Oops?
Loddlenaut
Which is so funny, because I wouldn’t even say I’m madly in love with it or anything. I think it just so happened to come at a perfect time for me - it was a rainy day in the middle of winter so I was “freezing my tits off,” as we oft say here in Upside Down Land, and I was (and am) still recovering from when I threw my back out vacuuming the house to make it look pretty for our real estate dragging potential buyers and total strangers through our home. I guess I just didn’t feel like doing much else that day, and the allure of lying in bed, raising little alien fishies and cleaning up the ocean instead of doing literally anything else was very inviting.
Loddlenaut is as cozy and wholesome of an adventure game as they come. You play an unnamed fella in a diver suit employed by a cleanup service, tasked with tidying up all the pollution and biowaste amassed under the surface of planet GUP-14. A company named GUPPI once made their home here but have since left, taking their complete lack of self awareness with them and leaving empty soda cans, waterlogged laptops and purple goop in their wake. Said purple goop has corrupted the ecosystem, preventing local flora from bearing fruit and leaving the local fauna - the titular loddles - grumpy, unable to naturally evolve, and per each loddle’s status menu, “too goopy to eat.”
Capitalist troglodytes poisoning a whole aquatic ecosystem doesn’t sound very wholesome, which is why you’re here to make GUP-14 wholesome once more. Starting from your home cave, you’re led to surrounding biomes by your work buddy Dave (who thankfully isn’t omnipresent and only yaps when required. On ya, Dave.) and tasked with cleaning each of them up with a very simple gameplay loop and set of mechanics. A lot of the time you’ll be using your bubble gun to clean goop off of plants, coral and abandoned structures, which is a bit like playing a demake of Powerwash Simulator - point in the general direction of goop, hold R2, and your little guy will do all the work. While obviously more automated and not as involved as the aforementioned, it’s nonetheless satisfying in a very similar manner. Later, you’ll get new tools to suck up clouds of microplastics and scrub goopy puddles on the seafloor, but they follow the same simple principles.
You’re also tasked with scooping up any trash you find using your bubble gun - mashing R2 to trap trash and other objects in bubbles and suck it all up is honestly even more satisfying than goop cleaning, somehow - and you’ll take this trash back to your home base to recycle it into reusable bits. Cans and scrap metal form metal bits, jugs and six-pack rings make plastic bits, and so on. Recycled bits are then used to craft new upgrades, a couple of structures and other little goodies. A lot of it is fairly typical capacity upgrades or stuff that helps point out the direction of nearby waste, but important ones are oxygen tank upgrades and placeable recharge rings that refill your oxygen when you swim through them. Which means, yeah, there’s an oxygen meter to manage, but you can get quite a bit done even without any upgrades, and per the game’s wholesome nature, this is the most “stressful” thing you’ll ever have to manage. It’s not something you can safely neglect though, and by endgame you’ll still need to keep an eye out for any oxygen rings you’ve placed down, but the punishment for running out of air is a trip back to the home cave and losing some of your inventory where you passed o- hey, I thought we were playing a cozy adventure game, not a soulslike!
The stars of Loddlenaut, of course, are the loddles. Loddles are infinitely adorable little alien critters that somewhat resemble axolotls, and when you find your first gooped-up loddle while tidying up Ripple Reef, you’ll find these critters are so friendly that they’ll start following you with negative afterthought. You’re tasked with then locating more loddles and reintroducing them to their freshly scrubbed habitats, so they can lay eggs and multiply faster than Ratchet & Clank 2’s protopets.
They really are just the most adorable gosh dang critters, though. I love the little chirps and trills they make and the way they squint when their happiness is maxed out, and when you blink your suit’s lights around them, they’ll chime back at you, mimicking whatever rhythm you may have played. They can even be kinda helpful - some will give you a temporary speed bonus while using your suit’s boost function, while others emit a pollinating pulse that makes nearby plants automatically bear their fruit, which you can then pick and feed to them or take home and use to cook kelp tacos.
Food’s important as it helps loddles grow and, eventually, evolve. Keeping them on strict diets will allow them to bundle up into a cocoon and eventually take on a new adult form, and guys? Guys. As much as I’d love to put images of all the loddle evolutions to show you how infuriatingly adorable they all are, you’re just gonna have to take my word for it.
Helping along with the wholesome vibes is the aesthetic. Loddlenaut is smothered in low-poly charm, employing a pixel filter (which can be disabled or even cranked up) to really sell that chunky, simplified look. There’s a real satisfaction to seeing habitats slowly turn a peaceful turquoise as you vanquish those abrasive purples, too. The music is properly fitting; it sounds pretty much exactly what you think a deep sea adventure would sound like, and that’s nothing but a compliment. I also love a lot of the sound effects used, from the previously mentioned loddle chirps and item collecting sounds to the whirring of your bubble gun as it seeks out goop to obliterate.
As an aside, like I mentioned earlier I played this on my new Steam Deck, and frankly it felt like it was made for this thing. It ran nearly flawlessly without really touching any settings, with only a few frame rate drops here and there as each habitat reached full capacity. I don’t know if this was because I had limited my system to 10W to conserve a bit of battery (I played it for 8 hours and had it back on charge twice) but even if not, this isn’t a game that needs precision reaction times, so it’s inconsequential and not a mark against the game at all.
For as cute as loddles are, I wish you could do a little bit more with them. You can name them, feed them, give them toys to headbutt, blink your lights at them and, yes, even pet them, however there isn’t much else you can do with them, and they don’t do anything on their own apart from swim, eat and chirp. Biomes will eventually start getting dirty again and loddles may even find themselves gooped up once more, but there isn’t really much of an incentive for keeping each area clean and each loddle happy, unless you don’t want fruit-bearing plants corrupted. The reward for getting the ocean 100% clean is rather pitiful, and there’s no achievement tied to it either, so you’ve gotta be really invested in your loddles to want to keep their habitats spick and spam. Since they’re so passive and lack interactivity, I didn’t find much of a reason to do so, beyond my first few loddles.
The back-and-forth between each biome and your home cave can be quite tiresome, especially since you don’t unlock fast travel for each area until it’s 100% clean for the first time. Thankfully the open world is quite small and propelling around the map is a fairly breezy affair, but there is a lot of this regardless.
And this complaint is minor, considering the kind of game it is, but I wish Loddlenaut leaned a little harder into the environmentalist themes it presents. GUPPI is framed as a totally incompetent and selfish corporation but we learn very little about it beyond a few collectable ID cards. There also doesn’t seem to be any sort of comeuppance for GUPPI, who are implied to have simply flown to a new planet to no doubt poison it and ruin its ecosystem, too. Your diligence is rewarded with a short, sweet little cutscene that says the loddles you met will miss you - and gosh dang it, I got at least a LITTLE teary-eyed at that - but it’s bittersweet knowing that this is a cycle that will simply continue until humans witness their own extinction. Which, I suppose, isn’t Loddlenaut’s fault, then, and if anything is a very true-to-life lesson that we need to accept, but also understand that we can at least do something about it. Regardless, I think the story, for as limited as it is, might have hit a little harder if it was implied that GUPPI at least suffered a little for their ineptitude, and would make its “you saved the loddles! hooray!!!” ending a little more deserved.
I may be being a little too harsh here, however. Sure, I was hoping for a bit more depth from its creature-raising mechanics, and I wish the story wasn’t quite as shallow (I went the whole review without a sea-based pun. Let me have this). But I suppose it really isn't trying to be these things - it’s trying to be a wholesome little game about cleaning up the ocean and raising loddles at your own pace. Considering I finished it in a single day, I don’t think “trying” is the correct word here. Loddlenaut is endlessly adorable and scratched an itch on my brain that few games have done in recent memory, and it’s worth picking up just to have a chat and share some banana lilies with some of the cutest creatures ever devised for video games. Siren loddle supremacy!
PROS
That’s why I’ve been so excited to finally have a Steam Deck of my own. Playing games at my desk feels like work sometimes, but firing up my Deck and flopping down on my bed or curling up into a pasty white ball on the couch for short periods of time sounds not only unfathomably comfy and cozy, but a sure-fire way to finally chip away at my backlog, knocking out games that I probably wouldn’t have blinked twice at on PC. Just a little half an hour session every now and then, I would imagine to myself. Just a quick sesh in-between other things.
Anyway I played the entirety of Loddlenaut within a 26-hour timespan yesterday. Oops?
Loddlenaut
Year: 2023
Developer: Moon Lagoon
Publisher: Secret Mode
Played on: PC (Steam Deck)
Also on: Switch
Genre: adventure / cozy
HLTB: 5-8 hours | My playtime: 8 hours
Which is so funny, because I wouldn’t even say I’m madly in love with it or anything. I think it just so happened to come at a perfect time for me - it was a rainy day in the middle of winter so I was “freezing my tits off,” as we oft say here in Upside Down Land, and I was (and am) still recovering from when I threw my back out vacuuming the house to make it look pretty for our real estate dragging potential buyers and total strangers through our home. I guess I just didn’t feel like doing much else that day, and the allure of lying in bed, raising little alien fishies and cleaning up the ocean instead of doing literally anything else was very inviting.Loddlenaut is as cozy and wholesome of an adventure game as they come. You play an unnamed fella in a diver suit employed by a cleanup service, tasked with tidying up all the pollution and biowaste amassed under the surface of planet GUP-14. A company named GUPPI once made their home here but have since left, taking their complete lack of self awareness with them and leaving empty soda cans, waterlogged laptops and purple goop in their wake. Said purple goop has corrupted the ecosystem, preventing local flora from bearing fruit and leaving the local fauna - the titular loddles - grumpy, unable to naturally evolve, and per each loddle’s status menu, “too goopy to eat.”
Capitalist troglodytes poisoning a whole aquatic ecosystem doesn’t sound very wholesome, which is why you’re here to make GUP-14 wholesome once more. Starting from your home cave, you’re led to surrounding biomes by your work buddy Dave (who thankfully isn’t omnipresent and only yaps when required. On ya, Dave.) and tasked with cleaning each of them up with a very simple gameplay loop and set of mechanics. A lot of the time you’ll be using your bubble gun to clean goop off of plants, coral and abandoned structures, which is a bit like playing a demake of Powerwash Simulator - point in the general direction of goop, hold R2, and your little guy will do all the work. While obviously more automated and not as involved as the aforementioned, it’s nonetheless satisfying in a very similar manner. Later, you’ll get new tools to suck up clouds of microplastics and scrub goopy puddles on the seafloor, but they follow the same simple principles.
You’re also tasked with scooping up any trash you find using your bubble gun - mashing R2 to trap trash and other objects in bubbles and suck it all up is honestly even more satisfying than goop cleaning, somehow - and you’ll take this trash back to your home base to recycle it into reusable bits. Cans and scrap metal form metal bits, jugs and six-pack rings make plastic bits, and so on. Recycled bits are then used to craft new upgrades, a couple of structures and other little goodies. A lot of it is fairly typical capacity upgrades or stuff that helps point out the direction of nearby waste, but important ones are oxygen tank upgrades and placeable recharge rings that refill your oxygen when you swim through them. Which means, yeah, there’s an oxygen meter to manage, but you can get quite a bit done even without any upgrades, and per the game’s wholesome nature, this is the most “stressful” thing you’ll ever have to manage. It’s not something you can safely neglect though, and by endgame you’ll still need to keep an eye out for any oxygen rings you’ve placed down, but the punishment for running out of air is a trip back to the home cave and losing some of your inventory where you passed o- hey, I thought we were playing a cozy adventure game, not a soulslike!
The stars of Loddlenaut, of course, are the loddles. Loddles are infinitely adorable little alien critters that somewhat resemble axolotls, and when you find your first gooped-up loddle while tidying up Ripple Reef, you’ll find these critters are so friendly that they’ll start following you with negative afterthought. You’re tasked with then locating more loddles and reintroducing them to their freshly scrubbed habitats, so they can lay eggs and multiply faster than Ratchet & Clank 2’s protopets.
They really are just the most adorable gosh dang critters, though. I love the little chirps and trills they make and the way they squint when their happiness is maxed out, and when you blink your suit’s lights around them, they’ll chime back at you, mimicking whatever rhythm you may have played. They can even be kinda helpful - some will give you a temporary speed bonus while using your suit’s boost function, while others emit a pollinating pulse that makes nearby plants automatically bear their fruit, which you can then pick and feed to them or take home and use to cook kelp tacos.
Food’s important as it helps loddles grow and, eventually, evolve. Keeping them on strict diets will allow them to bundle up into a cocoon and eventually take on a new adult form, and guys? Guys. As much as I’d love to put images of all the loddle evolutions to show you how infuriatingly adorable they all are, you’re just gonna have to take my word for it.
Helping along with the wholesome vibes is the aesthetic. Loddlenaut is smothered in low-poly charm, employing a pixel filter (which can be disabled or even cranked up) to really sell that chunky, simplified look. There’s a real satisfaction to seeing habitats slowly turn a peaceful turquoise as you vanquish those abrasive purples, too. The music is properly fitting; it sounds pretty much exactly what you think a deep sea adventure would sound like, and that’s nothing but a compliment. I also love a lot of the sound effects used, from the previously mentioned loddle chirps and item collecting sounds to the whirring of your bubble gun as it seeks out goop to obliterate.
As an aside, like I mentioned earlier I played this on my new Steam Deck, and frankly it felt like it was made for this thing. It ran nearly flawlessly without really touching any settings, with only a few frame rate drops here and there as each habitat reached full capacity. I don’t know if this was because I had limited my system to 10W to conserve a bit of battery (I played it for 8 hours and had it back on charge twice) but even if not, this isn’t a game that needs precision reaction times, so it’s inconsequential and not a mark against the game at all.
For as cute as loddles are, I wish you could do a little bit more with them. You can name them, feed them, give them toys to headbutt, blink your lights at them and, yes, even pet them, however there isn’t much else you can do with them, and they don’t do anything on their own apart from swim, eat and chirp. Biomes will eventually start getting dirty again and loddles may even find themselves gooped up once more, but there isn’t really much of an incentive for keeping each area clean and each loddle happy, unless you don’t want fruit-bearing plants corrupted. The reward for getting the ocean 100% clean is rather pitiful, and there’s no achievement tied to it either, so you’ve gotta be really invested in your loddles to want to keep their habitats spick and spam. Since they’re so passive and lack interactivity, I didn’t find much of a reason to do so, beyond my first few loddles.
The back-and-forth between each biome and your home cave can be quite tiresome, especially since you don’t unlock fast travel for each area until it’s 100% clean for the first time. Thankfully the open world is quite small and propelling around the map is a fairly breezy affair, but there is a lot of this regardless.
And this complaint is minor, considering the kind of game it is, but I wish Loddlenaut leaned a little harder into the environmentalist themes it presents. GUPPI is framed as a totally incompetent and selfish corporation but we learn very little about it beyond a few collectable ID cards. There also doesn’t seem to be any sort of comeuppance for GUPPI, who are implied to have simply flown to a new planet to no doubt poison it and ruin its ecosystem, too. Your diligence is rewarded with a short, sweet little cutscene that says the loddles you met will miss you - and gosh dang it, I got at least a LITTLE teary-eyed at that - but it’s bittersweet knowing that this is a cycle that will simply continue until humans witness their own extinction. Which, I suppose, isn’t Loddlenaut’s fault, then, and if anything is a very true-to-life lesson that we need to accept, but also understand that we can at least do something about it. Regardless, I think the story, for as limited as it is, might have hit a little harder if it was implied that GUPPI at least suffered a little for their ineptitude, and would make its “you saved the loddles! hooray!!!” ending a little more deserved.
I may be being a little too harsh here, however. Sure, I was hoping for a bit more depth from its creature-raising mechanics, and I wish the story wasn’t quite as shallow (I went the whole review without a sea-based pun. Let me have this). But I suppose it really isn't trying to be these things - it’s trying to be a wholesome little game about cleaning up the ocean and raising loddles at your own pace. Considering I finished it in a single day, I don’t think “trying” is the correct word here. Loddlenaut is endlessly adorable and scratched an itch on my brain that few games have done in recent memory, and it’s worth picking up just to have a chat and share some banana lilies with some of the cutest creatures ever devised for video games. Siren loddle supremacy!
PROS
- I require a mountain of loddle plushies, STAT
- Cleaning up the ocean scratches my brain good
- Wonderful cozy atmosphere
- Great Steam Deck performance
- You can make the loddles chirp to the rhythm of Megalovania
- Trips back to home base can be tiresome
- Could have done more with its environmentalist theming
- I wish there was more to do with the loddles
VERDICT: A great little game to snuggle up under the covers with and not have to think too hard about. Though I wish they did more with its environmentalist themes and the loddles themselves, I already miss my little loddle friends after finishing it. If we ever get a sequel, please let me give them a little kiss.
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