Owlboy took nine years to make. You can feel every one of them in the flying.
D-Pad Studio, a Norwegian independent outfit, began work on Owlboy in 2007. The game shipped in November 2016 for PC, with versions for PlayStation 4, Xbox One, Nintendo Switch, Mac and Linux following. That is a long road for a side-view platformer about a mute owl boy who cannot fly without a cloak. It is also the reason the thing moves the way it does.
Trailer, via D-Pad Studio.
Otus and the Owl Cloak
The player controls Otus, a member of an owllike humanoid race called the Owls. Otus is mute. He is also accident-prone, which in the floating settlement of Vellie counts as a moral failing. The other villagers look down on him. He is not seen as a suitable successor to the owl name.
His mentor Asio trains him anyway. Asio gives Otus an owl cloak, and the cloak grants flight. The Owls do not naturally fly like their wild counterparts. The cloak is the whole trick, and it is the whole game.
Flight in Owlboy is not a traversal gimmick you forget about between set pieces. Otus hovers, dives and carries objects through the air. Those objects vary in use. Mostly they are ranged weapons, thrown weapons and puzzle-solving tools. The distinction matters more than it sounds. A rock you throw at a pirate is also a rock you set on a pressure plate, and D-Pad rarely lets you forget it.
Geddy, Alphonse and Twig
Otus does not stay alone. As the game progresses he gains allies who accompany him, each with their own weapon and exclusive properties. The first is Geddy, a human who serves as the Vellie Guard and calls himself Otus’s friend. Geddy is the one who pulls Otus out of a small bout of depression early on.
When pirates attack Vellie, Otus and Geddy set out to save the village. The roster grows. Alphonse is a former pirate. Twig is a former ally of the pirates. Both join the fight against the band that hit Vellie.
The switching is the combat. Each ally brings a different weapon with different properties, and encounters are built around cycling through them. It keeps a single-player game about a silent protagonist from feeling like a solo act. It also means the difficulty curve is really a roster curve. You do not get stronger so much as you get more options.
Vellie, Advent and the Ruins Below
Owlboy is set in the land of the sky. The islands of the world below were separated by a catastrophic event. Vellie floats among them, a village made up of many different islands and populated by humans and owl-humanoid creatures alike. The floating city of Advent, the capital, sits nearby.
The areas around Vellie and Advent hold old relics and temples from the time the ancient owls were larger in number and ruled the land. That history is not decoration. Otus uncovers the lost truth of the Owls as he goes, and the game asks him to fix mistakes that predate him.
What follows is a journey through monster-infested ruins, with unexpected encounters and burdens no one should have to bear. The pixel art sells the scale of it. Vellie looks warm and lived-in. The ruins do not.
A Nine-Year Pixel World
The development cycle is the headline fact about Owlboy, and it shows in both directions. The pixel work is dense and confident in a way that short projects rarely manage. Backgrounds carry depth. Character animation carries weight. The world looks like it was drawn by people who had years to redraw it.
Nine years also shows in the design’s caution. Owlboy is a platform-adventure with puzzle and indie elements, and it rarely takes a swing it cannot land. That is not a criticism of the craft. It is a criticism of the ambition. The game is polished to a shine and almost never surprises you with a mechanic you have not seen before.
The flying is the exception. Carrying objects through the air while dodging fire is a genuinely specific pleasure, and D-Pad builds encounter after encounter around it without wearing it out.
What the 8.9 Says
Owlboy holds an 8.9 out of 10 critic aggregate across 13 outlets, as recorded by IGDB. That number is high, and it is earned. This is a game that does exactly what it sets out to do, at a level of finish most independent releases cannot touch.
The 8.9 also flatters the game slightly. A score that high implies a work that changes how you think about its genre. Owlboy does not do that. It is a beautiful, well-built platform-adventure that plays its hand early and plays it cleanly for ten-plus hours. The allies add texture. The story adds stakes. Neither rewrites the form.
What it does do is justify the wait in the only way that matters. Nine years of development could have produced a bloated mess. Instead it produced a tight, gorgeous game with a clear mechanical identity. D-Pad spent its time on the right things.
The parts worth watching are the flight and the roster. The parts worth forgiving are the puzzles, which rarely ask more than the obvious. Otus is mute, and the game never quite figures out how to make that silence carry emotional weight the way its art carries the world.
Numbers and Platforms
- Title: Owlboy
- Developer: D-Pad Studio, Norway
- Publisher: SOEDESCO Publishing, D-Pad Studio
- Release: November 2016
- Development began: 2007
- Platforms: PC (Microsoft Windows), PlayStation 4, Xbox One, Nintendo Switch, Mac, Linux
- Genre: Platform, puzzle, adventure, indie
- Mode: Single player
- Perspective: Side view
- Critic aggregate: 8.9/10 (IGDB, 13 outlets)
Where Owlboy Stands
Owlboy is worth your time, and it is worth your money at whatever price it currently sits. The flight system is the reason. Otus carries objects through the air and those objects are weapons, thrown weapons and puzzle tools all at once, and D-Pad never lets that triple duty get stale.
The allies are the second reason. Geddy, Alphonse and Twig each bring a weapon with exclusive properties, and the game’s combat is really about knowing which one to bring to which fight. It is a small idea executed with real care.
The story is the third reason, and the weakest. Otus uncovers the lost truth of the Owls and has to fix their mistakes. That is a fine frame. It is not a frame the game fills with anything you have not seen in a dozen adventure games.
So: 8.9 out of 10. That matches the published aggregate, and it matches what the game is. A gorgeous, disciplined platform-adventure from a Norwegian studio that took nine years and did not waste them. Not a landmark. A very good game, made very well, and one that earns its reputation on the strength of how it feels to fly.
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