December 21, 2023 - Day 354 - NewPlay Bonus Review
Total NewPlays: 376
Game: Okami HD
Platform: Steam
Release Date: Dec 13, 2017
Installation Date: Dec 21, 2023
Unplayed: 0d
Playtime: 53m
Okami HD is a third-person action-adventure game, and a HD re-release of Okami, a game that was originally released for the PlayStation 2 and the Nintendo Wii.
It's genuinely like nothing else I've played this year. The game is set in "Nippon", and you play as the reincarnation of the Shinto sun goddess "Amaterasu", embodied in a white wolf.
You are accompanied by a bug named Issun who doesn't like being called a bug, and WILL NOT STOP TALKING. Issun is your guide.
You can break things throughout the game by headbutting them; in combat you fight with a sword that's held in your mouth.
However, what truly makes this game unique (other than the art style, which is based on classic Japanese painting styles, including Sumi-e), is that one of your combat techniques is literally painting.
You can fight an enemy until they are drained of colour, and then go into a "painting" mode, and use your brush to attack them with the various brushstrokes you learn throughout the game.
I've found some games hard to categorise because they're a mashup of so many game ideas that I end up with a long hyphenated description. I borrowed the description for Okami HD from the game blurb, because I just don't have a frame of reference to apply.
My only points of frustration with the game are that the camera was wildly frustrating until I found that you can (and I needed to) invert both the X & Y axes, and that manual saving is required, which can only be done at specific locations.
I've become so habituated to auto-saves, that even though the game goes out of the way to highlight the save system, I still managed to wipe out over half an hour of game progress before I realised what I'd done.