Olija

I keep coming back to the fact that Thomas Olsson made this alone, out of a studio in Kyoto, and somehow convinced Devolver Digital to ship it. That origin matters because Olija carries the unmistakable weight of a singular artistic vision: every cave mouth, every castaway rescued, every boss silhouette feels chosen rather than generated. You play as Faraday, a shipwrecked lord stranded on Terraphage, an archipelago that sits somewhere between Lovecraftian sea-horror and Japanese folklore. The goal is deceptively simple: find the keys, open the Shadow Gate, sail home. What happens between those two points is the game. The harpoon is the center of gravity for everything. Throw it at an enemy and you can teleport to its embedded tip, closing distance in an instant. Throw it at a distant ledge and you cross a gap you could never jump. The same weapon that skewers bog-soldiers also threads through lever puzzles, transfers electricity through wiring sequences, and lets you phase through walls if you pin the spear first and warp second. It does triple duty, and Olija keeps finding new angles on it right up to the final boss. Alongside the harpoon, Faraday carries a secondary - rapier for quick strikes, a musket or cannon for range, each requiring crafted ammo gathered from exploration and the castaways you rescue. The hat system ties the upgrades together: eight craftable hats that modify the harpoon's behavior, from life-stealing on hit to spinning the spear like a blade to channeling lightning through it. You likely will not use all of them in a single run, which is one of the few things that stings. The criticisms are real and worth naming. Basic enemy encounters are too soft; a screen of Clan Rottenwood goons folds without much thought, so the combat depth the harpoon implies goes mostly untested outside of boss rooms. The checkpoint system is punishing in one specific way: commit to a boss arena and you cannot swap your hat loadout without restarting from a much earlier save. There is no proper inventory screen, so crafting material management happens largely by memory. And the hub world of Oaktide, while charming as a growing castaway settlement, does not give you quite enough time to feel the full arc of what you are building there. These are real friction points. They do not break the experience but they do mark its ceiling. What elevates Olija above its limitations is mood, and specifically its sound. The soundtrack is a collaboration between Olsson, a Japanese saxophonist, and a shakuhachi player, pulled in a direction that critics compared to Ennio Morricone's spaghetti-western tension. It sounds nothing like a typical indie platformer. The music disappears in a couple of areas where it arguably should not, but when it is present it sets a register of melancholy and dread that the chunky pixel art, by itself, cannot fully carry. The art polarizes people: some reviewers found the blocky sprites beautiful and appropriately mysterious, others found enemy types difficult to read at a glance. I land closer to the first camp. The deliberately low-resolution characters let the imagination do work, and the background and foreground layering in levels like the bamboo grove set pieces is genuinely striking. Olija knows exactly when to break its own rhythm with a set piece, and those moments land because the pacing around them is so controlled. At around five hours, Olija is a complete short story, not a truncated one. Steam user scores sit at 89% positive across nearly 900 reviews, and the critical consensus at a 77 Metacritic lands in "good, with caveats" territory, which tracks honestly with what the game is. If you play for mood, for the tactile pleasure of a well-designed traversal tool, and for the rare indie that knows when to end, this is worth your afternoon. If you need combat depth and mechanical challenge across the full runtime, you will hit the ceiling faster than you want.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

Be the first to comment on Olija.