Wavetale

Some games are really about one verb. Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater is about grinding, Journey is about sliding down dunes, and Wavetale is about running on water. The best compliment it earns is that its sea is worth crossing for no reason other than that moving across it looks and sounds designed to feel good.

Wavetale comes from Thunderful Development, the Swedish studio formerly called Zoink!. Zoink! built a reputation on small, heartfelt, visually distinctive games, and this one follows that pattern. It was first made for Google Stadia and arrived on Steam and Nintendo Switch after that platform shut down, releasing on December 12, 2022. The game survived the move, but the unusual launch shows in its scope. It is a mid-budget adventure that knows its size, mostly.

You play Sigrid, a lively girl raised by her grandmother in Strandville, a flooded archipelago that is slowly crumbling into the sea. Sigrid befriends a mysterious shadow that lets her run across the surface of the ocean. A dark force called the Gloom is spreading across the islands, and she has to fight it off, rescue islanders, help rebuild their communities and uncover her family’s hidden history.

The game sits squarely in the cozy action-adventure space. It invites comparison to The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker and Journey, and the comparisons are earned, though they flatter it a little. The split reception tells the story: players reward how it feels, while critics mark it down for what it lacks. Both have a point.

• Water-running traversal: Sigrid surfs calm seas and big swells, launches off wave crests, glides through the air and grinds along rails. The movement system carries the whole game.
• Vertical ruin exploration: The drowned buildings of Strandville are climbable, so every island has height as well as a shoreline.
• Net-based combat: Sigrid fights shadowy creatures and huge sea monsters with a net-like weapon. The weapon makes sense in the fiction, but the combat is shallow.
• Island hubs: Each island has light traversal puzzles, side quests, time trials and collectibles, including costumes and upgrades that improve Sigrid’s abilities.
• Community restoration: Rescued islanders return and their settlements rebuild, so progress is visible in the world.
• Compact runtime: The story wraps up in a single relaxed weekend, longer with full completion.

The Movement Is the Game

What sets Wavetale apart is not the story or the setting. It is momentum. Sigrid does not swim or paddle. She sprints across the water, and the sea responds. Flat water lets her cruise. Swells work like ramps. The bigger waves turn open water into something close to a skatepark that keeps moving. Hit a crest at the right angle and she goes airborne. Glide from there and she can reach a rooftop, catch a rail and keep going without stopping.

The design suggests the developers tuned input responsiveness and speed curves before anything else. Direction changes read as responsive rather than twitchy, and the transitions between surfing, gliding and grinding appear built to preserve speed. Plenty of games have a traversal gimmick. Few commit to it this fully. Here the movement is the main loop, not a way of getting between content.

Remember this section, because it is the only strong reason to buy the game.

Combat: A Placeholder That Shipped

Wavetale’s combat is nowhere near that quality. Fighting the Gloom’s shadow creatures with the net comes down to simple, repetitive encounters: close in, attack, repeat. Enemies hardly change their behavior, and fights almost never use the movement system that makes everything else good. Having a water-running hero stand still to swing a net at a blob is a design own-goal.

The sea-monster fights come closer to the right idea, because size and spectacle bring the traversal back into play. They still work more as set pieces than as tests of skill. Anyone coming here for action will be disappointed. Combat seems to exist because an “action-adventure” is expected to have some, not because the team had anything to say with it.

Puzzles and the Open-World Checklist

The puzzles are light, and that is meant literally. Most amount to working out how to get somewhere, and the answer is nearly always “run faster” or “climb higher.” That fits a game aimed at a broad, relaxed audience, but none of them has an “aha” moment.

The island hubs have a more structural problem. Time trials are the best side activity, since they test the movement system directly. The rest (costume collectibles, scattered pickups, errand-style quests) borrows the checklist design of bigger open-world games without the scale that makes that design pay off. On a critical path this short, the padding is obvious. Collecting upgrades that improve Sigrid’s abilities feels like progression at first, but the game is short and easy enough that they are rarely needed.

Narrative and Tone

The writing does better. Sigrid is spirited without being grating, the grandmother gives the story an emotional anchor, and the warm, funny supporting cast makes rebuilding each island feel personal rather than mechanical. The family-secrets thread is predictable, but it is told sincerely, and sincerity is harder to fake than people think.

Pacing is where the short runtime helps. Wavetale ends before its thin systems wear out. It finishes with a want for more of the movement and not much more of anything else, which may be the most accurate verdict the game gives on itself.

Onboarding and Flow

There is very little onboarding friction by design. The game shows what to do instead of burying players in tutorial text, the difficulty is gentle, and failure costs almost nothing. That suits the audience it is plainly aiming for, which is players who want a mood more than a challenge, along with younger or less experienced players. Anyone who has finished Breath of the Wild should expect never to feel tested.

The hand-painted look is excellent. Strandville’s ruined towers, bright water and soft skies have the storybook clarity Zoink! has always been good at. Stylization matters for more than looks here. It keeps the sea readable at speed, so a launchable crest is distinguishable from a harmless swell at a glance, and in a game about momentum, that visual clarity is part of the controls.

The gentle soundtrack fits the relaxed tone. It stays in the background during exploration and swells at the right moments without pushing.

A 2D-styled adventure of this scope is light on hardware, and the art direction depends on unbroken fluid motion. That makes any platform that struggles to hold a steady frame rate a poor match for this particular game, because frame drops in the middle of a jump hit the one thing Wavetale does best.

Steam (PC): This is the version to buy. A controller is close to mandatory. Analog steering is essential for carving across waves, and mouse-and-keyboard input turns fine speed control into blunt digital input. PC hardware also gives the frame pacing the most headroom, which is what the traversal depends on.

Nintendo Switch: Handheld play seems like a natural fit for a short, cozy, colorful adventure, and analog sticks suit the steering. But the Switch is the platform where the fluid motion the whole design is built around is most at risk. Choose Switch only if portability is the priority and some roughness is tolerable.

Wavetale does one thing very well and several things barely adequately. That one thing is the sensation of running on the ocean, and it is done well enough that we would recommend the game on that basis alone — but only at a discount, and only on PC.

It is still a flawed game, and the flaws are front-loaded. Combat that doesn’t use the movement, puzzles that never push back and collectibles that pad a short campaign all keep it from being the Wind Waker successor its opening suggests, and at $29.99 the asking price outruns the content. The split between warmer player sentiment and cooler critical reception makes sense: one group is responding to how the movement feels, the other to how little is built around that feeling. Both have a case.

Thunderful got the hardest part right, which was making movement fun enough to carry a game. A sequel that designs its combat and puzzles around that movement could be excellent. This game is a promising, very short sketch of that idea — and a sketch is not what most people should pay full price for.