Official Review
Well, it's sort of about that. In Loddlenaut, Moon Lagoon has produced a peaceful ocean purification quest in which you zip around with an underwater jetpack tidying up rubbish and un-gooping gooped-up scenery. On the way, you meet and care for little fish-like critters called loddles, then do a bit of crafting to top things off.
In this fantasy job sim / Tamagotchi mashup, you play the part of an astronaut sent to the planet Gupp-14 to depollute its ocean from beneath the surface. This starts off with rubbish collection: a special bubble gun captures and collects drifting trash, like discarded bottles or plastic six-pack rings. A trip to the recycling bins lets you deposit what you've gathered and earn reclaimed materials. These materials let you upgrade your tools and your suit, in turn letting you collect more rubbish, and so on and so on. It's a tried and tested loop of activity and it's no less compelling in Loddlenaut than anywhere else.
But it's the gameplay extras around that core that give this game its personality. Adding a little spice to the mix is an oxygen gauge. While it's pretty generous (we had to run out once on purpose just to see what happened), you do still need to top it up by jetting through bubbles emitted by some plants or through special rings that give a full tank. Those special rings are one of several items that can be crafted using the materials returned by the recycling bins, allowing you to set up little oxygen outposts for deeper exploration.
The other big aspect of this game is the loddle care. When first encountered, your loddle is covered in goop and wants to be cleaned. It then has needs on top of cleanliness, including hunger, happiness, and the desire for a home. Providing that home means purifying one of the map's biomes thoroughly enough that a loddle is willing to live there. Serving these needs helps your loddles evolve, and a loddlepedia keeps track of the different kinds you've encountered. Rounding off the virtual pet experience is the ability to name your companions and craft them toys and snacks.
Although we were often inclined to sympathise with our radioed-in advisor's seeming annoyance with the loddles, the cutesy relationship-building definitely changes the game from a collectathon of rock-scrubbing into something more open-ended. Loddlenaut is a place to hang out and let your brain have some time off. It's a pleasantly immersive experience and the soundtrack sometimes took us back to the feeling of exploring underwater in Mario 64 (but it controls more precisely than that, don't worry). However, this is equally a game you could play whilst doing something else – a soothing place to be while you listen to some music or have the TV on.
However, that open-endedness does have a downside. Even after you have worked hard to 100% an area, it will start to get mucky again after a bit of time away. It adds to the feeling that the decontamination project is an ongoing process, but it also disincentivises fully cleaning everything in the first place – it's only going to get goopy again.
Your loddles are similarly needy: they don't seem to be able to look after themselves even in a lovely, pure area of the ocean – that said, they don't seem to perish when neglected either. They need to be seen less as a job to do and more as a friend to spend time with. Whether you can find that state of mind will be very much up to you.
Loddlenaut also nearly undoes itself with its sheer gentleness. Although there is real satisfaction to blasting dirt away and gathering detritus, the fact is that the dirty environments already look quite lovely. The before/after comparison is not as dramatic as it could be, despite an overall change in the water color from a gloomy purple to a cheerful teal.
It's interesting then that the story sometimes unravels like a horror game. It's revealed through brief snippets of text found with the lost ID cards of workers at the nefarious corporation that's exploited the ocean in the first place. What happened to them? Surely these ID cards would have been on their person at all times? There are discarded remains of machinery and some sort of processing plant. Clearly something went horribly wrong at some point. We were half-nervous that our microplastics vacuum would get clogged up with a human arm or something. (That never happened, just to be clear.)
But nothing can really add stress to the experience of Loddlenaut. Controls are smooth enough – two sticks as usual, with 'A' to jet up and 'B' to jet down. Positioning yourself just right in a 3D underwater setting can be tricky in any game, but there's no need to fret here, as the right trigger will automatically point your laser, vacuum, or collector bubbles at anything nearby that needs zapping, sucking or grabbing. It doesn't always get the thing you intended to get, but there's no need to get things in the right order anyway. Apart from the practicalities, controls are tactile, whether it's the repeated tapping to collect a hoard of scrap ripped from a bin bag or holding the button to rocket microplastics down the gaping throat of the recycler.
Conclusion
Loddlenaut is sort of a job sim where the job in question feels futile. Cleaned places need re-cleaning, fed loddles need re-feeding. Given that the project at hand is to purify a mega-corp-abused ocean, it's quite a downer that the game feels so unwinnable – but maybe that's the point, in a melancholy kind of way. In any case, if you don't overthink it, the environment is calm, the loddles are cute and the execution leaves few irritations. If this is a PowerWasher's fever dream, then it would be a shame to wake up.
