Kraken Academy!! is just about everything I want in a game whose primary setting is high school. There are friends to make, mysteries to solve, and of course the obligatory giant octopus in a lake.
Heads up: There will be light spoilers ahead, but hopefully the kind that help you decide if this game is for you and not any that will dampen surprises.
The story here is pretty simple: The Kraken enlists your (unwilling) help in saving your rundown school and with a magical, time travelling tentacle charm players are able to freely explore and converse on their way to saving the spirit guardians that have been inexplicably imprisoned within select students.
Each ‘run’ is three days and players have multiple options for jumping ahead if they’d prefer not to engage with much of the non-core content. But, this is a narrative adventure! I imagine most of the target audience is all about those sweet side quests, especially when they are all about befriending the quirky and talented members of the faculty and student body.
I’m always a big fan of time cycling in games. It gives developers the ability to create really interesting and complex stories that are all happening simultaneously. Completing the entire game in this context requires actively familiarizing yourself with the events of the various stories and their timing within the cycle. I’m not bitter or anything, but this is a mechanic I absolutely adored about Majora’s Mask yet it is constantly referred to as the reason people didn’t enjoy it. Glad to see the mechanic getting the love it deserves. 23 years late, but better late than never.
But back to the guardian spirits. They seem to be trapped within the oddest students possible within the school, and aren’t very helpful as far as, you know, guardian spirits go. Very stoic and detached, which I imagine is on purpose. Lucky them, the eclectic residents of Kraken Academy more than make up for the spirits’ apparent blandness. There’s no shortage of big personalities in Kraken Academy!!.
Really, there’s so much players can do it does almost give the feeling of agency in an open world game. You wanna watch a child fight a bear? You got it. You wanna summon a poop demon as part of secret cult? Done. You wanna reunite estranged relatives? No problem. Oh, and let’s not forget players are specifically given leave to destroy just about any vessel on the premises with a baseball bat. It’s considered helpful! At least if you’re not the janitor.
There’s a feeling of community mindedness that weaves throughout the entirety of the story. Befriending includes giving, doing favors unbidden, and generally being a good person within your new social group, extending beyond your own club and into all the others. The purposeful involvement of the NPCs to this degree was a good move by the development team. While playing, I wasn’t just a hero rushing through spaces with faceless NPCs barking at me, but instead a proactive community builder and problem solver.
Were some of the problems needing to be solved kinda whacky? Sure! Were some of the solutions ridiculous? Yes. But it’s all in good fun, and Kraken Academy!! was definitely good fun. I hope to see more games with community-centric vibes this year.
Play Stats
Platform: Xbox
Completion: 100%
Time Spent: No idea. The save states don’t show time. Probably ~15 hours
Game Info
Developer: Happy Broccoli
Publisher: Fellow Traveler
Platforms: PC, Xbox, Switch