Platform: Nintendo Switch, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X
Publisher: Whitethorn Games
Developer: Polygon Treehouse
Medium: Digital
Players: 1
Online: No
ESRB: E
If you’ve ever read Greek mythology – or even if you’re vaguely aware of it – you’ll know one thing: Greek gods and goddesses are all absolutely terrible people…er, deities. Vain, vindictive, murderous, jealous: take all the worst traits of humanity, throw in horrifying stories of rape, murder, and cannibalism, and you’ve got the Greek pantheon and its myths in a nutshell.
So, naturally, Mythwrecked: Ambrosia Island asks the important question: wouldn’t it be cool if you could befriend them all?
Of course, Mythwrecked is a cozy, family-friendly game, so it doesn’t really get into the dark side of Hera, Zeus and friends. Instead, it reimagines them as hipsters, aging veterans, gardeners and, in the case of Hermes, a delivery man in a Speedo, and gives them all amnesia so they can’t really remember anything about their past. Which, all things considered, is probably for the best if you’re going after that “E” rating.
Into the lives of all these amnesiac gods and goddesses arrives your character, Alex, a lost backpacker looking to make her way home. To do that, you need to literally earn the favour of the gods, and you do that by running errands for them, and finding their lost items.
In other words, fetch quests. So, so, so many fetch quests.
I don’t want to say that Mythwrecked is basically one long series of fetch quests, but really, that’s pretty much the entire game. You meet a god, you exhaust all your dialogue options, and then they give you tasks to complete so that they can trust you, and open up to you, and become best friends for ever and ever and ever. The game helpfully gives you plenty of tabs to keep track of all your quests, which is good because, again, that’s literally all you do here. There’s the odd puzzle here and there, but they generally consist of lining up one line with another line, and they’re even easier than they sound.
While all the quests undeniably give you something to do and give Mythwrecked its general form, at the same time it all feels a little weird. The game, as is typical of many cozy/wholesome games, is all about the power of friendship, except in this case friendship is a purely transactional endeavour: you do things for the gods, they become better friends with you.
It might feel worth it if the “doing things” part was interesting, but for the most part, it’s not. The tasks are things like feeding seagulls and turning on lights, and searching for items lost by the forgetful gods and goddesses. What’s more, to do that you walk back and forth across a decent-sized island; you can unlock portals at a certain point relatively early on, but it’s all a lot of work for not a lot of payoff.
Unless, I guess, you count befriending the Greek pantheon as an adequate pay-off. And even if the versions of Zeus, Hera, and Ares are a lot more pleasant here than they are in, say, God of War, there’s not really anything about that – or this game – that makes Mythwrecked: Ambrosia Island worth recommending.
Whitethorn Games provided us with a Mythwrecked: Ambrosia Island PC code for review purposes.
