Endless Ocean Luminous: Discover Marine Life in This Relaxed Diving Game
The latest game in the Endless Ocean series is now available on Switch.
Posted 6 months ago
Developer Arika and Nintendo have released Endless Ocean Luminous on Switch. This third title in the Endless Ocean series is the follow-up to 2009’s Endless Ocean 2: Adventures of the Deep for Wii.
Endless Ocean Luminous allows players to become the newest member of Project Aegis, a research project designed to determine why a large World Coral is dying and stop the spread of its mysterious “disease.”
The game takes players to the Veiled Sea, an “ocean of mystery” with topographical features that change each time they dive in a new area. There, they’ll be able to scan and photograph hundreds of different fish and marine creatures, and learn about each species through narrated encyclopedic entries.
Luminous features multiple gameplay modes, including a story mode, single-player dives, and multiplayer dives for up to 30 players. The story mode is split into chapters, and players will be required to scan a certain number of creatures across the game’s single- and multiplayer game modes before the next chapter is unlocked.
During each solo or multiplayer dive, players may encounter a wide variety of extant marine life, as well as mythical creatures and long-extinct species, including some who lived alongside the dinosaurs. Thankfully, every species is passive, allowing players to freely swim as close to large sharks and other typically dangerous creatures as they want without worrying about being attacked (the game’s storyline explains this unique quirk in the environment).
While diving, players can also find lost salvage, as well as complete objectives that are associated with a mysterious stone tablet with 99 squares (and therefore 99 objectives) that’s found early on in the game’s story.
Luminous encourages players to thoroughly explore each dive site, which can be viewed on a grid-based map. Rather than being required to completely explore a site in a single dive session, players can end their current dive and return to the same area at a later time, so long as they don’t choose the option to explore a new site. If players find a dive site they particularly like, they can return to it at any point in the future through the use of a unique Dive-Site ID generated by the game.
As players continue to explore the Veiled Sea, they’ll earn experience points and in-game currency as rewards for their actions. Players can spend coins to personalize their diver’s appearance, as well as unlock new stickers and emotes that can be used during multiplayer dives, with additional unlockables becoming available to purchase as players level up or earn in-game achievements.
Even though the use of procedural generation means each new environment in the Veiled Sea is technically different from the last, the overall gameplay loop remains very simple, creating a relaxed, even cozy experience for marine life enthusiasts. While some players may find this gameplay a bit too repetitive (and it’s disappointing that story chapters have unlock requirements), there’s a true feeling of surprise and delight to be experienced when “randomly” coming across an interesting extinct species or discovering ruins from an ancient civilization.
Finally, multiplayer dives add a bit more action to the experience, as players can mark interesting finds to point them out to their diving companions, and groups can cooperatively tackle special research missions that players would otherwise have to complete on their own.
Endless Ocean Luminous is now available in physical and digital formats.
Endless Ocean Luminous code provided by Nintendo.