Paced like an artsy-fartsy emotional piece about teenagers who want to touch each other, Albatroz is odd. You play as Isla, a young American woman who has gotten bored on the 9-5, and instead of doing the sane thing (like getting a gun and shooting the boss), she decided to go backpacking through South America, or wherever this fantasy land, “The Forgotten Lands,” is. Pretty (to a degree) by design, much like all those [shop concept] Simulator games popping up, Albatroz is another one of those mountain climbing/adventure games that seem to be popular too.

A touch survival as much as it is an adventure, Albatroz also wants you to care about its simple story. Isla is not just escaping the 9-to-5 (I hear it is a way to make a living), she’s following her brother’s dream of being an adventurer, such as the dangers of walking up a small incline. Unlike Peaks of Yore, Jusant, and similar hiking/climbing games, Albatroz wants to be more of an RPG in the sense of whatever you imagine as the worst entry in the Final Fantasy franchise. Excessively long, clunky dialog; mechanically interesting but holding itself back; and puts a bit too much emphasis on pulling control away to make you focus on something for several seconds.

Do I even like Albatroz? To a degree. The survival mechanics of having to find and conserve water and food, changing clothes in temperate conditions, and emphasizing following directions not by way markers but by following actual directions are interesting. It is how Among Giants and SOEDESCO go about it that sometimes feels a little unintuitive or clunky, often finding the quickest or simplest way of going about these ideas before making them fun. Put simply, the survival is a little too quick to get into an adventurous rhythm, conditions change every third step, and it is easy to get lost without much great design to quests.

One thing that stood out quite early on was after you get to the village of your “manic pixie dream girl” friend and translator, El Condor. Once you’ve slogged through dialog that is about as direct as a taxi driver who knows they can get an extra few bucks out of you, you try to leave the village. Too bad the village idiot is guarding the exit, across the Shadow of the Colossus bridge, and he’s not had his mother’s empanadas this morning.

Through translation that is done as well as a certain politician’s speeches, you are told to go find him some food, but the woman who makes food in the hotel won’t give you any nor can you take his mother’s empanadas to him. In a dark corner, on the other side of a fireplace from where you can get some food to sedate your own grumbling stomach, is a small bowl that draws as much attention to itself as a teenager at a school disco. At this point, after exploring up and down the village, talking to every Sheet-Cow and Cow-Sheep, I wanted to throw Isla off the side of the village perched atop a large rock.

I think this is emblematic of Albatroz’s design in general. Some may say it takes away all the hand-holding we’ve gotten used to in modern game design, which I have already said is an interesting idea. It is how the world and how the game itself is designed that falters in that regard which makes it difficult to enjoy. The majority of your time is spent exploring and following directions on a map, for example, the first mission after getting to El Condor is to head West, West, West, and West. Then you are told to push further west once you get West.

I’m cutting out the flavor text, but beyond “make sure you can always see X point of interest,” it is that simple. The trouble there is, a majority of your time is spent in dense, generic forests getting soaked in rain, trudging over fallen twigs and rocks, and searching for supplies to survive the few miles you have to, as the Village People said, “Go West.” There is a small compass in the bottom left of the screen, but otherwise, it is easy to get lost when you are running out of supplies as quickly.

The “Fun” of exploring is quickly lost when invisible walls send you back with Isla saying something about numbered rules she has. She isn’t Mark Harmon, she doesn’t need rules to remind her not to wander off a path. She might need some direction though and help from an extra-dimensional being as on more than one occasion I stumbled into bugs that were, to put it lightly, utterly ridiculous. This was on top of the performance that wavered like a bipolar patient in a psych ward.

First off I want to say that I don’t hate Albatroz’s art direction, though I’d hardly sit here and defend it to the hilt. Characters up close look like plastic, and the world when in gameplay doesn’t look great, but at a distance, it can look ok. Despite this direction for the art being “simple” the performance of Albatroz can and will be atrocious. Running everything on “Epic” for a while (aside from motion blur) I’d see occasional drops into the 40s, but when things got quite busy running through forests I’d opted to drop down to medium on some settings. Mostly shadows or effects.

This is when the frame rate was at its worst. I could see anything from 60 frames per second to 13. Though admittedly one notable time when Albatroz hit 13 frames per second, Isla was flying through the air after climbing on a rock on the side of a mountain, only to land like a banker on the pavement. This meant that Sence went back half a mile and forced me to go up and around that mountain again. All of which was running anywhere between 45 frames to the late 20s.

Meanwhile, the objective of that first exploration outside of El Condor was to get to the old witch’s hut. Ok, Geyla isn’t a witch, but the less said about that segment the better. However, while exploring outside of the old woman’s hut I had the lion, the witch, and the audacity to stand on the old woman’s switch (not the console), throwing Isla under the world, and by proxy because companions follow, so did Sence. Thankfully there was a save point I’d already saved at, but Albatroz doesn’t have auto-save, so if you do find a bug, you may be thrown back a good bit in your progress.

I will say this for Albatroz, the broad story isn’t a terrible idea: You are a young woman searching for her brother who she idolizes. Her brother, Kai, is on the search for the mythical mountain of Albatroz, the walking mountain. What is bothersome in that is how poorly the dialog is at being natural, or how the voice acting feels like an amateur dramatics production of that one scene from Final Fantasy X. If you get easily annoyed at characters blocking progress in JRPGs, you’ll want to get in the car and run Juan and Romero down.

The idea of getting food and water from natural sources, that’s not a bad idea, especially while exploring. However, the need to eat and drink, the need to feed and water the companions, and doing so every few moments, that’s beyond annoying. Being given directions that name certain parts of generic-looking forest and mountain regions, as if being told “you couldn’t miss it,” is annoying. Changing regions or conditions every few steps, that’s also quite annoying.

Albatroz is a bunch of interesting ideas done in just a way that’s annoying enough that it makes playing, especially playing to hit embargoes, quite annoying. With maybe a bit more time, a bit more focus and restraint, trimming down and refining Albatroz, I think Among Giants would have a solid game. It is the execution that feels too under-served. Whether it is points of interaction making you focus on certain things too long or some of the simpler bugs.

Ultimately, Albatroz isn’t too special despite having a couple of ideas that make it unique. The mythology, the simple mechanics, and the general exploration ideas all offer something refreshing, however, stopping every few moments to eat and drink breaks up the flow of exploration. Albatroz feels like a game that is dated by its execution rather than its ambitious ideas, which given more time to refine could make the paint-by-numbers dialog more palatable. South American Death Stranding without the full commitment.

A PC review copy of Albatroz was provided by SOEDESCO for this review.

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Albatroz

$39.99

5.5

Score

5.5/10

Pros

• Solid mechanical ideas.
• An emphasis on exploration that doesn't include way markers.

Cons

• Performance that is terrible.
• Survival that feels like it breaks the flow of gameplay rather than enhances it.
• Near game-breaking or tiresome reoccurring bugs.