This both serves as a place for Norah to record events, and as a quick reference dump for clues. You have one crucial tool to aid you in all of this: your journal. So you nose through photographs, letters, notes and drawings for anything which can tell you how his team managed to proceed. You always seem to be one step behind him. Clues can take many forms, but usually a fair few are gleaned from the detritus left by your husband's expedition.

Solving puzzles involves combing the area for clues, until you have all you need to tackle the conundrum at hand. Since this is a game, these puzzles often focus on opening a door of some kind, but not always. The game is broken into chapters, and each of these takes place in a self-contained area of the island, which you cannot leave until you solve a handful of major puzzles there. It surprised me how much of an adventure game Call of the Sea is. I know now, having played Call of the Sea: it is. Who was she, Norah Everhart, and what happened to her husband? And what was waiting for her there? An island that appeared to be calling to her. Here was a non-violent and eerie game about a lone female on a voyage to find her husband, whose expedition hadn't returned from the island. It was a cartoon exaggeration of paradise.īut it was also the tone. Literal red sun baked the sands, literal green shone luminously from pools. It was partly the setting: a vintage, 1930s exploration mission to a dazzling tropical island, where colours burned brighter than life. Availability: Out now for ~£17 on PC (Steam, GOG, Humble, Windows) and Xbox Series S/X, and Xbox One.

And once I'd seen it, I couldn't stop thinking about it. But even among all the other blockbusters it stood out. I'd never heard of it and never heard of the developer. One game really leapt out at me during the Xbox Series X showcase earlier this year, leapt out like a big wet fish. A dazzlingly different debut with a haunting sense of place and adventure.

Download free call of the sea xbox