I thought the art was very nice, with a wonderful painterly style! I was particularly impressed by the “surface” of the ocean! Control-wise everything felt solid, and the garbage claw functioned extremely well, in my opinion… I loved playing with that thing! Very emotive! The garbage collection mechanic felt very good too!
The collision with the garbage pieces in the water sometimes felt odd. Not game breaking in any way, but sometimes the garbage seemed to just float past my sub, while other times it felt like my boat was colliding with and flinging the garbage into the watery void. Again, this wasn’t really game breaking, just something I noticed a couple times.
Speaking of the garbage, I didn’t notice any explicit reason to collect it (except for an excuse to use the awesome claw!). There was no garbage counter, no score associated with it, nor did I encounter a story element that spoke to my garbage collection efforts (of course, this last point may be due to my not finding the end of the game). For a game that has collecting garbage as a core story element, I feel there should be something stronger driving the player to really want to do so (beyond the pure desire to use their spiffy claw thing!)
As far as the story, I feel I missed a bunch of it. While a chunk of that can be pinned on me being a goofball on stream and not noticing/ignoring the dialog boxes that came up, I feel another big part of that was the dialog boxes didn’t sit and wait for me, but rather were automatically on a timer. I feel dialog should always progress at the user’s choice. Sadly, this means I think I missed about half of what was being told to me :(
Lastly, I’m feeling there should have been some element(s) that guided the player to the important story beats. While I do enjoy open environments, there are times when it’s nice to know where the story actually wants me. I felt I was left to figure out where to go, and I worried I was just missing huge chunks of the game because I didn’t know where I was supposed to go. Maybe something like “the garbage slowly flows towards the closest story element” or maybe “schools of fish come and go from story elements”.
Over all, though, I thought with was a really well done game! Here’s a link to my stream of the game, for your entertainment, or self torture, lol!