“A cozy exploration-and-crafting adventure: fly your seaplane between tropical islands, collect resources with the Swirler, rebuild storm damaged communities, and unravel the mystery surrounding Uncle Lou’s disappearance.” – Steam Description

Lou’s Lagoon puts you in the pilot seat as you play an unnamed protagonist searching for their lost Uncle Lou. You grew up on stories of your uncle’s daring flying escapades and hair raising adventures. Even if he seems bigger than life to you as a kid you’ll find that he’s wrapped up in a grander story as you progress. This is billed as a cozy exploration and crafting game, and it’s pretty much exactly as advertised. The crafting that you do reminds me of the My Time.. series in that you queue up a crafting request at the specific crafting bench and it takes real life time to process. As for exploring, there are chests hidden throughout the world, platforming puzzles, and even out of the way NPCs to find who can give you side quests. At least, that’s on foot. The real highlight of this game for me was the flying, which is great because you will use your seaplane to island hop between the 4 major islands and a few other smaller islands.

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Finding Your Sealegs

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After an opening cutscene laying out a bit of backstory from your Uncle’s point of view, you are presented with a character creation menu. The character models are charming and you have a few options to choose from here. One of the biggest problems I have in games with character creation is when you make a character in there and then get into the world only to find the colors are wrong or only worked in that creation lighting. Luckily, this game lets you change your appearance so none of this is set and stone and you can experiment to your heart’s content.

You arrive on the island and find that your uncle has gone missing. Being that Lou of Lou’s Delivery is gone, they are left without a delivery person. As the niece or nephew of famed pilot Lou, you obviously can fill in his shoes while you search for him, right? You agree to help and get to work repairing an old plane for you to use. You’re given the basic vacuum tool called a Swirler which just reminds me of Slime Rancher or maybe Luigi’s Mansion.. no no, definitely Slime Rancher. You will use this Swirler to collect materials, place materials in builds, and even in combat so get used to your new best friend.

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It Takes a Village

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As you travel around to the islands, you’ll find out that all their radio towers are broken. Communication is so important, especially with the storm ravaging the islands, so you get to work with setting up the radio towers again. Once you get an island’s radio tower set up you are able to take on side missions from Lou’s Lagoon.

These missions serve as ways to interact with NPCs you might not have normally. As well as acquiring Zipper, your inventory, slot upgrades and cores to unlock new crafting recipes. There are a plethora of different characters, each with their own personality, for you to discover across the islands inside the game Lou’s Lagoon, not to be confused with the island Lou’s Lagoon.

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Dress for the Job You Want

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There are a bunch of chests scattered across the islands for you to discover. The chests can give you Zipper upgrades, resources, or more importantly clothing. I love love love character customization in games and this one is no different. It was my biggest drive to search for new chests because “What if there is a cute hat in one of them?” Island chests aside, you can also find them while flying. There are boxes labeled with an ‘X’ that you can fly through to gain the same type of things from land chests.

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• Graphics– The graphics are super cute. I think the models are super well done not just for the player but for the NPCs and different races. These are super unique models that are expressive and fun to look at.
• Gameplay– This is the biggest stumble here. I love how this feels to play. The flight, the movement, the platforming, the collecting. It all feels fantastic. However what doesn’t feel good at all is the pacing. The story and traveling to the different islands is so fun but as I mentioned, the crafting requires real time for each item. You run into quests that ask you to craft a tier 2 or 3 item, and to make that you need to craft a tier or two before that to combine. So if a tier 3 item takes 4 minutes to craft 1 but you need 5, and to get that you need 20 of two tier 2 items that take 2 minutes each to craft.. well, you spend a LOT of time just waiting for things to craft so you can progress to the next story beat. It feels like they are just padding the runtime in a 12 hour game. I put about 17 hours into the game doing some collection towards 100% but a lot of it was waiting on craft timers while I scrolled on twitter or watched Youtube, and that doesn’t feel good.
• Sound– Sound design is good, the little sounds the NPCs make instead of voice acting is charming.
• Controls– Flight controls are a blast, I could not stop myself from doing the flight challenges. You unlock fast travel between the islands pretty early, but I chose to fly 90% of the time because it felt so fun to do so. Ground controls handle well, and like I said in gameplay, it just feels great to play this game.
• Story– The story was surprising. I thought it was going to be a simple find your uncle short and sweet game. There is a deeper story and a well thought out lore and mythos here that I really think you should discover yourself.