No matter how good a game may look or sound, it can never fully succeed if it doesn’t have the confidence in itself and in its audience. It’s this lack of grit that keeps Okabu from standing out in a sea of charming PSN titles. The game places you in the role of a pair of whale-shaped clouds called, creatively enough, cloud whales who are tasked with defending the peaceful inhabitants of the land from industrial creatures known as Doza. The story has equal shades Fern Gully and Avatar, but thankfully, it never becomes too preachy. There are frustrating moments where the narrative is presented by slow moving and unskippable blocks of text, but thankfully the story is mostly told passively, and avoids ever becoming too cumbersome.
As a cloud whale, you have the ability to absorb liquids and dispense them at your will, carry passengers with unique abilities, and fire projectiles at specific targets. You float around each area using your powers to cleanse the land of the mechanical menaces that seek to defile the otherwise peaceful world. However, you can only choose between a single power at a time, so switching between the pair of floating nimbi on the fly becomes an integral part of the game. There is a two-player co-op mode, but in all honesty solving puzzles becomes a frustrating shouting match if you aren’t in complete control of both characters.
