With a new banner for the fall season proudly displayed on SuperPhillip Central's header, we also have a new review to read together on the site. It's a cozy game that is one part platforming and one part crafting. It's all Lou's Lagoon, and here is the SPC review.
You win some, you "Lou-se" some.
Lou is a local hero at the ol' archipelago--a famous, fabled deliveryman loved by all, who helps supply the tropical seas with the materials and goods each island demands, needs, wants, requires, etc. When a sudden strong storm hits the archipelago, Lou goes missing upon going out to do a little investigating. His current whereabouts? Well, they're unknown! That'd be a problem indeed for the archipelago, but your character has a more personal stake in Lou's disappearance: he's your uncle! So in his absence, you tentatively take over his island, get help from his employees, and take the keys to his airplane to soar around the archipelago in search of him.
The beginning of Lou's Lagoon eases you into the most essential gameplay loops and formulas through some simple tutorials in the form of quests. It all starts with being handed an impressive and important tool known as the Swirler and being tasked with siphoning up materials with its electronic tendril-like vacuum arm in order to repair your plane.
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| I'd carry more materials, but I currently don't have "mushroom" to do so. |
Starting out, the Swirler lacks a powerful enough oomph to it. It can grab level one materials like driftwood and pebbles, for starters, but anything else will cause it to futilely attempt to suck stronger materials until it eventually overheats. The Swirler is helpful enough, and you earn other gadgets along the way to assist you on your adventure, such as fishing rod, an excavator to find hidden goodies underground, and even a Breath of the Wild-like glider. All of these can be upgraded with various materials in addition to in-game currency.
You'll find out relatively quickly that upgrading is not only helpful but pretty much a prerequisite to make progress in Lou's Lagoon. There are some roadblocks that get put in front of you which require certain tools requiring specific materials. Not all materials are found in the wild.
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| Your inventory may be limited, but at least pleasant views are in a surplus within Lou's Lagoon. |
No, instead, they must be crafted. You have myriad means to craft in Lou's Lagoon. You have a refiner that takes scrap and other junk and transforms it into more useful materials. You have what essentially comes down to a loom which creates textile materials like silk and cotton. Then, there's the manufacturing station that makes components like processors and chips.
All of these craft-able goods need you to earn their recipes through various skill trees of sorts. As you complete quests around the archipelago, you earn what amounts to points that unlock new recipes on these trees of recipes. The deeper you delve into each type of crafting stations' trees, the more complicated and costly the required material becomes.
This doesn't just stop at the cost of materials or money. No, there's also a rather sizable time investment as well. Lou's Lagoon uses a crafting system that works in real time. It's not instant. If you insert materials into a given crafting station or machine, you're going to be waiting a fair amount of time for the machine to finish and cough up your bounty of desired materials. This can take upwards of minutes just to get one material--now to be fair, that's one of the higher rated materials in the game. Still, it's a long time to wait.
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| As the late and great Tom Petty once sang, "The waiting is the hardest part." |
Sure, you can explore the islands of the archipelago or even wander around Lou's Island in the meanwhile to grab more materials for later, but that compounds things with another of the game's problems. Starting out, your inventory is limited to about ten different materials that you can hold at once. This can be upgraded through completing quests and finding upgrades in treasure chests, and you can also hold a modest amount of extra materials in your plane's cargo hold, or sell them to a shopkeeper to later repurchase.
The point here is that you will find yourself quickly running out of space for materials and constantly juggling between what to carry and what to leave behind, especially when a fair number of quests require you to build something with materials, return to the quest giver with the correct materials, etc.
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| Like your character, your plane is yours to customize as well. Aye-aye! That's a sharp dresser! |
Lou's Lagoon is, as stated, set on an archipelago, so you're not limited to the starting island. After all, what good is a plane if you can't FLY it!? You do get some time in the sky, mainly transporting yourself from one of the four main islands of the game that eventually open up to you. There are also materials and money that can be received by flying through balloons and specific crates in the sky, as well as time trials where you attempt to fly through a set amount of rings within a time limit, but for the most part, your plane is to travel from island to island.
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| Times like this are when I wish Baloo was piloting this bad boy instead. |
The islands themselves contain one major town apiece surrounded by what amounts to platforming playgrounds, covered in materials to nab, optional treasure chests to find, and uncharted areas to explore. Your character has no health bar and has no real dangers to worry about. Yes, there are pirates that don't take too kindly to your arrival in the archipelago and will attempt to attack you with a smack of their sack full of plundered booty, but this is but a daze. There's no fall damage, and the only actual danger is getting stuck in a buggy part of the environment with no way out. Fortunately, the pause menu houses an "I'm Stuck!" prompt specifically for these occasions, taking you back to the entrance of an area for the times this occurs.
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| Lou's Lagoon's four islands each have their own environments, challenges, and, of course, quests to complete. |
Really, the need for an emergency teleport is the least of Lou's Lagoon's technical problems, at least when playing on the Nintendo Switch 2 version like I was. Truth be told, Lou's Lagoon is one of the most unpolished and uneven games of this cozy type I've played in a long time. There were glaring turn-offs like frame-rate issues where the FPS sunk to slideshow levels at rare but certainly noticeable times, and moments where the camera couldn't focus on the character you're speaking to, instead opting to awkwardly focus on the background. (This was a much more commonplace problem with the presentation.) Loading times also leave something to be desired, as well.
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| I think I see a shrine over ther--wait. Wrong game. |
Still, Lou's Lagoon left me warmly wanting more rather than instead of leaving me out in the cold. Yes, its inventory and crafting systems should be updated if even a little bit to help with the grind, and polishing and debugging for the presentation and multiple technical issues are required for certain. Even with all of my gripes with the game, I deeply enjoyed the adventuring aspects, the platforming, the exploration, the massive amounts of customization, and much of the colorful cast of quirky characters. As it is now, Lou's Lagoon is a tough game to wholeheartedly recommend in its current shape when half of the experience is mired and betrayed by its design.
[SPC Says: C]
A code was provided by the publisher for the purpose of this review.
This game was played via the Nintendo Switch 2 version. Lou's Lagoon is also available on PlayStation 5, Xbox Series consoles, and PC.
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