Sayonara Umihara Kawase (Steam VR)

VR Shop Score – Silver Award

System: Valve Index, HTC Vive & Oculus Rift
Price at Time Of Review: £10.99
Comfort Rating: Green
Genre: Platform
Input: Gamepad
Best Playing Position: Sitting
Multi-Player: No
Age Rating: PG

 

Description: Umihara Kawase is the name of our backpacking, Japanese, sushi chef heroine armed with a fishing rod, elastic fishing line, and a fishing hook. Face fish-like enemies, conveyor belts, spikes, watery pits, time travel and more. Collect items, and find your way to the end of each level. The deeper into this dream-like world that you venture, the more challenging the solutions and the greater the time pressure becomes. Along the way, look out for shortcuts and secret exits, and unlock bonus levels.

The elasticity of Umihara’s fishing line sets the Umihara Kawase Trilogy apart from other games, giving unprecedented levels of mobility and discovery. Tightening the line or giving lots of slack can be the difference between success or failure. The elastic nature of the fishing line allows the player to stretch down to otherwise unreachable areas or be catapulted upwards.

Review: Sayonara Umihara Kawase (one game from the Umihara Kawase Trilogy) is a cutesy platform game based on the PlayStation Vita game that most people would have probably never heard of let alone played. The good news is that it really doesn’t matter if you have not heard of it. So is this Japanese indie platformer any good? Well, to be fair it certainly looks pretty good. Playing in VR it looks like a pretty good Diorama build with a well-animated character running around inside of it. Graphically wise this game is up there with some of the best VR platform games around.

You play as Umihara Kawase who seems to be a Japanese sushi chef who is also pretty mean with a fishing rod. She can not only catch fish with it but climb walls and swing across huge gaps. The idea of each level is to get from A-B with ‘B’ being a door (sometimes there is more than 1 exit). As you wander around each dream-like scene you have enemies to deal with as well as trying to work out how you will get to the next platform above.