Siren’s Wharf certainly nails a creepy atmosphere but could use a bit of polish overall. I liked the sound design, hearing a lot of creepy footsteps whenever an enemy was near made it nice and tense at times. The graphics are what they are. I am not a huge fan of the retro look simply because it usually comes off as grainy as it does here. It’s hard to appreciate any art direction or detail when it all just looks like mush. This is more of a critique on the whole genre of retro style games than just Siren’s Wharf. The story seemed interesting although with the short run time it is hard to expand on much detail or character background. The game play itself was solid with the harpoon gun. There was enough ammo and it was responsive. I do wish you could pick up the used harpoons but with all of  the ammo lying around it wasn’t a big deal. The puzzles were well done, neither too easy or too annoying.

    I played Siren’s Wharf on Linux. It did have one technical issue as whenever I tried to change the graphics setting it would take a long time to make the switch, one time even freezing the system requiring a hard restart. I didn’t notice any other bugs or any spelling errors. There is just the one graphics setting. There was no v-sync option but it seemed to use v-sync anyway. Alt-tab didn’t work. You can;t save the game, which isn’t a big issue with the short play time, but you can pause it. You can’t edit controls but you won’t be using them much and the defaults aren’t terrible. Performance was great but that was to be expected with the visual quality.

Game Engine: Unity
Graphics API: OpenGL
Disk Space Used: 466 MB

Game Settings Used: High, 1920x1080
GPU Usage: 0-91 %
VRAM Usage: 649-890 MB
CPU Usage: 6-10 %
RAM Usage: 2.0-2.1 GB
Frame Rate: 137-144 FPS

    Overall this was a solid experience. It had the makings of a good full game if the developer ever wants to expand on it.  I finished it in 11 minutes and despite the visual style enjoyed my time. It made me want more which is a good thing and many of the short comings weren’t big issues due to the short run time.

My Score: 7/10

My System:

AMD Ryzen 5 2600X | 16GB DDR4-3000 CL15 | MSI RX 580 8GB Gaming X | Mesa 21.2.5 | Samsung 970 Evo Plus 500GB | Manjaro 21.2.0 | Mate 1.26.0 | Kernel 5.15.2-2-MANJARO | AOC G2460P 1920*1080 @ 144hz