Lou’s Lagoon. The perfect tropical vacation destination. Scintillating sunshine, sparkling beaches, cosy cafes and slow, island living. Until a tropical storm comes along and shakes up this archipelago. That’s when your uncle Lou, the archipelago’s only air delivery pilot, decides to investigate the storm. And disappears in the process!
Now it’s up to you, as Lou’s only family, to take on his delivery duties, fix up the storm-wrecked towns and, hopefully, find Lou in the process. Them’s some big shoes to fill, but you’ve got the go-getter spirit to fill ‘em!
Lou’s Lagoon is a laid back, cosy adventure game that mixes its chill vibes with the crafting genre. It sacrifices the survival aspects that are usually locked to the crafting genre in favour of a narrative-focused exploration of family and community, both natural and formed. It’s a strangely welcome melting pot of gaming mechanics that relies on our human desire to solve problems, achieve goals and build things to our hearts content. It also relies on our desire to explore, to see all that the world has to offer but to slow down while we do so and enjoy the experiences around us.
It’s this slow approach to crafting, without the traditional time or danger limits that the genre usually entails, that makes Lou’s Lagoon such a joy to play. While it may not escape all the pitfalls of that particular genre, it does a great job of capturing the creative aspects of gameplay that makes the loop of gathering, crafting and building so enticing. That it’s at whatever pace you dictate is what makes it so relaxing. Not having to worry about something damaging my builds or endangering my every step to acquire a rare ingredient is utterly captivating.
Lou’s Lagoon does an admiral job of both stripping back much of the gathering and crafting clutter so prevalent in the genre while also streamlining as much of it as possible. You have one major tool at your disposal that can be upgraded to perform multiple functions for crafting, building and analysing the environment. A glider will help you get to those hard to reach places and there’s a stripped back pool of extra manufacturing machines to help you refine your ingredients into other forms to use.
The core crafting and gathering loop remains as compelling here as it does in the best of these games. You explore to find new materials, harvest them, combine them when needed and finally forge whatever is needed for the moment. The game does streamline many of these aspects for the better. Early on, a drone becomes available to you that you can send out to harvest more materials for you, once you’ve discovered them that is, for a small amount of shellings, this worlds money. There are also fewer amounts needed to craft what you do as compared to most other games, but this is also balanced out by how much you can harvest from any source before waiting for it to renew.
The time for materials to be processed has also been paired back, letting you pop a whole bunch of final materials out in a relatively short amount of time while you’re busy with something else. And, finally, building and fixing structures is as easy as using your fabulous multi-tool to blow the parts into an item that needs fixing or, when you’re building your own little place to stay, as laying down the parts you need as in every other game.
You can get more done by constructing more drones or forging machines to deal with multiple things at a time, but I really didn’t feel the need to overload my workspace with machines to speed things up. I appreciated the laid back pace that the game started me with throughout the adventure.
To be fair, the bulk of Lou’s Lagoon activities are tied into fetch-and-give quests, fixing broken structures or crafting specific items for the archipelagos inhabitants. You’re a bit of a glorified delivery person after all, but the games charm keeps these sidequests entertaining. It doesn’t hurt either that they pay you in shellings and cores to unlock new part blueprints.
Until you repair the game’s fast travel points, you’re going to be jetting across the titular lagoon in one of Lou’s spare delivery seaplanes. Exploration is a massive aspect of the game, charting the lagoon as you fly around, discovering new and strange locations, and dealing with the occasional giant sea beast or air pirate. The exploration areas is relatively large, but this is no true open-world adventure, which brings me to one of the game flaws in that you have to load into each location that you’ve found. You can swim around the smaller islands that populate each location, but, sadly, there’s no jumping into the ocean and swimming your way over to that island that’s just a couple hundred more feet away. Hitting invisible walls in the wide, open ocean is just weird.
Lou’s Lagoon also puts a big spotlight on its narrative, which is designed to keep you exploring as well. It’s a fun little quest line that introduces you to this colourful world and its mythology. Here the design stylings are similar to most third-person exploration games in that you can sprint, double-jump and deal with pirates by essentially harvesting their ill-gotten gains away. Combat is a case of using your multi-tool to suck away at their “health bar” which sends them packing. Since the idea of the game is laid back fun, there’s no real danger in combat, or in taking long dives off of cliffs. Where most survival and crafting games are reliant on emergent gameplay to keep you engaged, Lou’s Lagoon is more predictably structured in its storytelling and gameplay loops.
One sore point for me is in the games inventory system or, rather, in how much space you don’t have. There are a lot of materials to discover but you can only hold so much in your inventory. Your seaplane has a cargo hold to store extra items and you can sell unwanted stuff, but how much you can keep on your person resulted in a lot of swopping items in and out while prioritising what to sell or just outright destroy to finish the task at hand.
Overall, Lou’s Lagoon is a cosy little adventure that feels bigger than it actually is. There’s a fun story, nicely varied locations to sit back and take the view in, and a lovely streamlined crafting system that made the art of building a joy to do again.
Pros:
- Nicely streamlined crafting system
- Varied locations to explore
- Exploration is a lot of fun
- No hand-holding
Cons:
- Not enough inventory space
- Invisible walls in the open ocean
Score: 7/10
Lou’s Lagoon was played on Xbox Series X using a code provided by the publisher. It is also available on PC, Xbox Series S, PS5, and Nintendo Switch 1/2.
Double AA Gaming 