For a game billed as a cosy crafting adventure, Lou’s Lagoon kicks off with a big dollop of drama. A violent storm has formed in the archipelago, making your character’s boat journey towards the titular lagoon a dangerous venture, and Lou isn’t even there waiting for you. No, He’s taken off in his plane to investigate the source of the storm, only to go and disappear. A disaster in normal circumstances made worse by the issue that Lou is the only delivery pilot in the area.
Well, Lou was the only delivery pilot, until you show up on a mission to find him while completing the jobs the locals need done in the wake of the storm’s damage. There are four communities within the archipelago all with their own issues to deal with. The central hub is Lou’s Lagoon where your base is located, and where you can return to craft, refine items, upgrade gear and pick up jobs for the other islands. It all seems simple to start, but you will soon realise that Lou’s Lagoon requires a lot of exploring to find the resources you need to craft object for the rebuilding effort.
The first tool you get access to is the swirler, which allows you to pick up items from the environment and add them to your zipper, but you cannot go all gung ho with your item collecting as the zipper only has limited storage. To assist with this you can store some items in the plane or sell them to Jackie, who sails from island to island on her trading boat.
There are a lot of resources to find across the archipelago, and some can only be found in specific places due to the nature of each location. As well as the swirler you have other tools to get the resources, like the fishing rod to get fish scales, a glider to reach isolated points, a builder to construct items, and another tool to detect things underground. There are limits for each tool which you can slowly overcome by upgrading them, but that’s not your only focus, as you also need to build additional machines including a refinery, a processor, a loomer, and a drone station. That last one of the list lets you send out drones to collect items you have already discovered, though this comes at a price.
A lot of Lou’s Lagoon’s gameplay loop has you flying from one island to another across the relatively small map. To make flying less monotonous you can hunt down resources floating in the sky and on the sea, grabbing them as you go. There is also the continuing storm to avoid, which can pull you in if you do not fly away from it in a hurry, and the tentacles of the kraken rising from the waves too. A mission in a later part of the game has you fighting off pirate airship, which I wish was a bigger part of the airborne side of the game. I did like the style of the map and how unique each area looked from the sky, serving as both a handy way to guide yourself and a colourful world to look at.
Lou’s Lagoon’s story is quite wholesome, though it is short and generally predictable, delving into themes of family conflict, the impact it can have on others, and reconciliation. The characters have their charm, though the vast majority of NPCs only have a couple of lines and no major bearing on events. The story missions generally consist of going to each area to find a relic, with some of the side missions helping to progress changes in the environment that allow the main story to progress. Those side missions do help add a bit more variety and some moments of comedy too, especially in Boulderia. Here a few of the quests require more platforming than resource gathering and while decently put together, some of generally platforming and navigation could have been better executed.
There were a number of times I got stuck in the environment, and even though there is an option in the settings literally called “I AM STUCK” which takes you back to the plane or closest checkpoint. It would have been better if getting stuck wasn’t such an issue that it needed a prominent menu item…
While I completed the story without issue, it was the post-story where another big issue occurred. You can keep playing Lou’s Lagoon, exploring and finishing requests from the inhabitants, but I was unable to further upgrade my gear as I could not interact with Fidge, who handles the upgrades. Everytime I tried there would be a noise and the game would just carry on without opening the upgrade menu. This meant I could not gather resources for some of the quests, essentially locking me out. If you want to avoid that issue, it is probably best to focus on all of the requests before embarking on the final story mission, and I hope that Tiny Roar will patch this soon.
