Professor Lupo: Ocean review for Nintendo Switch, PC

Are you a fan of walking slowly through grids and flicking switches? Then Professor Lupo: Ocean is the game for you!

Okay, that was probably needlessly snarky. It?s just that, after playing Professor Lupo, I found myself wholly indifferent to all of it. It?s a puzzle game where, as I said, you walk slowly through the remarkably grid-shaped ruins of a fallen spacecraft, occasionally pausing to flick a switch that will either open a door or let loose a flood of rushing or allow monster-fishes to come eat you. And I just didn?t care about any of it.

Some of the problem may be that I never played Professor Lupo and his Horrible Pets back when it came out in 2019, and it seems like Professor Lupo: Ocean?s plot connects to its predecessor in some way. I mean, it?s not as if the world of Professor Lupo: Ocean seems all that intricate or deep, and it?s not as if its amnesiac unnamed heroine requires that much of a backstory beyond “She?s awoken in a crashed ship and needs to escape,” but I?m willing to give it some benefit of the doubt.

The bigger problem, though, is probably that the puzzles here aren?t very interesting, and the controls aren?t very good (the latter of which, judging from Metacritic, was an issue that plagued the original game as well). Again, you?re just walking around flicking switches and trying to avoid flicking the ones that will allow the monsters to come eat you. Once you?ve seen what the game has to offer in one level, it doesn?t take long until you feel like you?re seeing the same level over and over again — which isn?t great, seeing as this game only includes 40 levels.

What?s worse, your character not only moves very slowly (which means that most of the time you see your death coming well before it happens), the controls aren?t very precise. Given that many of the levels are built around moving through levels quickly and taking some fairly tight turns to get your timing just right, you can probably see how that would get frustrating fairly quickly.

Though “frustrating” probably overstates how strongly I felt towards Professor Lupo: Ocean. It?s a forgettable puzzle game that may be interesting if you loved the original and want more of its world, but otherwise, you needn?t bother with it.

BeautiFun Games provided us with a Professor Lupo: Ocean Switch code for review purposes.