Olija’s harpoon combat and haunted islands still hold up five years on

Devolver Digital has a type, and Olija fits it: a small, strange game with a sharp hook and no interest in explaining itself. Skeleton Crew Studio’s 2021 release puts you in the boots of Faraday, a penniless fishing-village lord who sails off to find salvation for his starving village and loses his ship to a whale in a storm. He wakes on a fog-covered beach in Terraphage, an archipelago built from the wrecks of everyone else the sea has already taken.

It is a 2D side-scroller with 8-bit pixel art, a magical harpoon and a hat-crafting system. It came out in January 2021 for Windows, PlayStation 4, Nintendo Switch and Xbox One, with an Amazon Luna version following in October 2021. Six outlets aggregated to an 8.0/10, and that number holds up.

Trailer, via DevolverDigital.

Faraday and the wreck of the first ship

The setup does the work fast. Faraday is not a hero; he is a lord whose nets came up empty for years, which is why he got on a boat in the first place. The whale that destroys the ship is not a boss fight, it is weather. He wakes on the beach, finds what is left of his crew, and goes into a cave because there is nowhere else to go.

That cave sets the terms. Mysterious creatures attack. Faraday takes an ancient compass. A monster chases him out and he survives by jumping through a window. No tutorial box tells you the rules of Terraphage. The game just puts a monster behind you and a window in front of you.

The Boatman picks him up next and ferries him to Oaktide, a settlement made of marooned ships. The travelers, merchants and sailors there were caught in storms of their own and have given up on getting home. That is the real horror of Olija: not the creatures, but the people who stopped trying.

A harpoon that moves you and hurts things

The harpoon is the whole game in one tool. Faraday can throw it to teleport short distances, which makes it a traversal device, and he can use it as a weapon, which makes it a combat device. One button does both jobs, and the tension between them is where the skill lives.

Combat is razor sharp, as the game’s own pitch promises, and it stays that way because the harpoon never becomes a formality. You are always choosing between closing a gap and opening one. The 8-bit look keeps the action readable, which matters more than it sounds like it should.

Hats grant Faraday special perks and powers. It is a light crafting layer, not a second game bolted on, and it gives exploration a reason beyond the next map fragment.

Oaktide is a town of people who quit

The map system is the smartest structural choice here. Faraday finds a map in a cabin, and the Boatman uses it to find new locations across the islands. You are not unlocking a fast-travel node; you are handing a ferryman directions. The archipelago opens because you found paper.

Terraphage is populated by castaways who arrived the same way Faraday did, minus the stubbornness. They are merchants and sailors who settled. The game does not mock them. It just puts Faraday next to them and lets you feel the difference between a man who has stopped and a man who has not.

Olija herself is the enigmatic lady Faraday finds himself bound to over time. The game is named for her and she is not a companion in the mechanical sense. She is the thing the story is about, which is a strange and confident move for a game whose moment-to-moment business is stabbing creatures with a harpoon.

The Shadow Gate and the price of going home

The Shadow Gate is the endgame promise: collect all the keys, unlock it, return home. That is a clean objective and the game is honest about it. Every island you cross is progress toward a door.

What the gate does is turn the map into a countdown. The keys are not optional collectibles; they are the exit. So the exploration that Olija rewards with new hats and new sights is also, always, the exploration that gets Faraday closer to leaving the people of Oaktide behind.

That is the tension the story runs on. Faraday wants out. The castaways wanted out once. The game never asks which of them is right, and it does not need to.

Release schedule and platforms

What Olija gets right, and what it does not

The harpoon is the best thing in Olija and the reason to play it. A single tool that both moves you and fights for you forces decisions on every screen, and Skeleton Crew resists the urge to complicate it. The pixel art serves the action instead of decorating it. The map-and-Boatman loop gives exploration a shape that most indie platformers never find.

The weak point is scale. Terraphage is a country of wrecks and quiet survivors, and the game is more interested in atmosphere than in giving those survivors much to do. Oaktide is a good idea that stays an idea. The castaways who gave up hope are the emotional center of the story, and Olija mostly lets you walk past them.

The hat system is the other soft spot. Perks and powers are welcome, but crafting is the least essential verb in the game, and it never generates the kind of choice the harpoon does.

None of that sinks it. Olija is a swashbuckling tale with a cinematic adventure game’s sense of pacing and a very small team’s budget, and it knows exactly which of those two things to lean on. It is short, it is strange, and it trusts you to figure out the window.

Devolver has published a lot of games that look like this and mean less. Olija means something: facing the unknown in adversity, with a harpoon, and a door at the end that you have to decide whether you actually want to open.

Devolver Digital · game review · Indie Games · Olija · pixel art · Skeleton Crew Studio