Endless Ocean Luminous Review
I’ve always been mesmerized by the ocean: Thinking about the creepy, alien-like creatures that patrol its depths is simultaneously fascinating and frightening. So it’s incredibly disappointing that Endless Ocean Luminous’ take on one of the most exciting settings on Earth is boring, tedious, and downright aggravating. This deep sea diving adventure’s overreliance on randomized maps, events, and objectives makes it truly feel endless, and not in a good way. After 26 hours spent actively in dives and plenty more within its menus, I’m nowhere close to seeing the conclusion of Luminous’ shallow story, which is a big problem considering I feel like I saw everything its expeditions had to offer many, many hours ago.
Luminous’ dives have you cataloging all the wildlife living in a large body of water called the Veiled Sea. Each outing drops you into a randomly generated section, and from there you are encouraged to freely explore the map while scanning life and scavenging treasure. You can swim through twisting cave systems, coral reefs brimming with fish, or deep, dark trenches where only your flashlight reveals the way forward. Ancient ruins and abandoned shipwrecks also crop up on your expeditions, and while they’re somewhat cool to stumble upon the first time, all the locations look so similar across each procedurally generated dive that they almost instantly start to blend together.
Exploration should be at the heart of this game given there’s no combat and very little story, but I was bored by the Veiled Sea alarmingly quickly. I found it really tough to get invested in exploring a region when I knew I’d instantly forget about it after I finished my dive and was onto the next random map. If you uncover 80% of any given map, you are rewarded with a seed that allows you to return to that specific region, but they are all so similar that I never found a place worth going back to anyway. I wouldn’t go so far as to call Luminous an ugly game, but its incredibly simple terrain just isn’t exciting to look at, and certainly doesn’t entice me to explore it much.
Fortunately, the aquatic life itself looks much better than the environments they inhabit. The fish, sharks, whales, eels, dolphins, and more all look genuinely nice, so at least the stars of the show got the attention they deserve. There are over 500 species to catalog in these biomes, with a brief paragraph about each creature that teaches you the very basics of where it lives, what it looks like, and what it eats. Endless Ocean has the potential to be a cool educational tool, but sadly Luminous doesn’t give enough information about each species for it to meaningfully achieve that, so there are far better ways out there to learn about ocean life. That said, I did like the emphasis on creatures from the Triassic Period, as it was a fun surprise to suddenly be swimming among dinosaurs.
Instead of feeling like a living ecosystem, it’s basically a big underwater bus stop.
Besides looking cool, the fish don’t really do anything. The story explains with a throwaway line that the Veiled Sea is home to more pacifistic life than usual, so instead of feeling like a living, breathing ecosystem with predators and prey, it’s basically a big underwater bus stop where the fish don’t want anything to do with each other. They all just float around, unbothered by the apex predators swimming right beside them or the human disruptors snapping a camera in their faces. It’s disappointing, and makes the whole setting feel hollow and lifeless.
The main goal of each dive is to earn research points and money to upgrade your character, unlocking story missions in the overarching campaign while you do. As you level up, you can earn stickers and colors to decorate your wetsuit, emotes to use with other players in online co-op, and the ability to have bigger and cooler fish join your party to temporarily swim alongside you. These are mostly cosmetic upgrades, and I would have loved to see more meaningful options to improve exploration, like a better radar, faster swim speed, or more informative map.
The story missions aren’t doing Luminous any favors once you do unlock them, either. The 12 I’ve seen are all woefully short, generally taking between just one and three minutes to complete. Of the 30-plus hours I’ve spent in Luminous, easily less than 90 minutes of that has been related to the story, which is so shallow it might as well not even be there at all. Besides your silent protagonist, the only two characters I’ve encountered are your annoying diving companion, Daniel, and an AI assistant called Sera that lacks any sort of personality. That leaves you with a frustrating grind to unlock story chapters one-by-one that don’t provide much payoff. The cycle becomes this: Watch a short and mediocre story scene, enter a generic dive and scan an unreasonable number of fish in order to unlock the next underwhelming story beat, and repeat. The breaks offered by the story missions are so brief that they felt more like a gut punch before I was thrown back into the next generic, randomly generated underwater purgatory.
This was all true before I even encountered Luminous’ worst roadblock: The Mystery Board. This set of 99 completely hidden objectives is initially presented as optional, but later in the campaign Luminous abruptly gates story chapters behind completing the entire board. Squares on the Mystery Board are completed by doing things like discovering specific biomes, looting specific pieces of treasure, or scanning specific UMLs (unique marine life) throughout your dives, but their requirements are all kept infuriatingly secret until you incidentally manage to complete them.
I spent a lot of time just swimming aimlessly, hoping to stumble into what I needed.
And here’s the real catch: All of these MacGuffins are scattered randomly across Luminous’ procedurally generated maps, so there’s no guarantee that the biomes, treasures, and creatures you find won’t be repeats of squares you’ve already unlocked on the board. I spent a lot of time just swimming aimlessly, hoping to stumble into something that causes a Mystery Board notification to pop. It’s purposeless, unfocused, and frankly, felt like a waste of my time. Usually we have a policy of finishing every game we review at IGN, but after dozens of hours spent doing the same mindless chores I’ve been tasked with since the start, I still have dozens of boxes left on the Mystery Board and no way to know how long they’ll take to fill in because of how random Luminous’ progression is.
For example, I solved a riddle on a stone tablet early on that wanted me to swim alongside a Great White Shark in order to complete a square on the Mystery Board – but then I must have seen that same (now pointless) Great White Shark riddle reappear in two or three dives after that, rather than a different riddle that would lead to completing another one of the miserable 99 mysteries of the Veiled Sea. The biggest mystery in Luminous ends up being why anyone thought locking the final chapters of the story mode behind a task this gargantuan and arbitrary was a good idea, rather than leaving the Mystery Board in the hands of completionists who actually want to 100% it.
The most egregious instances of luck-based progression are found in the UML investigations. UMLs are Luminous’ mythical or fictional takes on real oceanic life, and while they often look quite cool, they’re also my biggest source of frustration. To summon a UML to your dive, you must track down between seven and nine fish emitting strange signals spread (randomly, if you couldn’t have guessed) across each map. When playing in multiplayer, where you could have up to 30 divers exploring the same chunk of the Veiled Sea at once, this ritual goes fairly quickly, as everyone is seeking out the same strange fish and working together toward a common goal – but it’s a slow and repetitive process if you’re alone alone.
In the two multiplayer sessions I joined during the review period, it only took around 20 minutes or so to scan the proper fish and call the UML to our dive. But when I played by myself and was responsible for scouring the entire ocean floor on my own, it could take between 45 and 90 minutes to find where these fish were tucked away – and just like the rest of the objectives in Luminous, there’s no guarantee the UML you summon won’t be a frustrating repeat. One time I happened to get the same UML on three consecutive dives, making zero progress on those Mystery Board missions across over three hours of gameplay. In a series that’s supposed to be about chill and relaxing ocean exploration, the sinking feeling that hits when hours pass by without any forward momentum drags any potential good vibes down to the sea floor.
To Luminous’ credit, the multiplayer felt pretty stable when I tried it, even with over 20 players exploring the same area. All divers drop into a different part of the map and have to track each other down to start exploring together, and you can then fast travel to the locations of any divers you’ve encountered face-to-face if you ever get split up, making getting around feel way less tedious. Unfortunately, multiplayer is held back in its own way by an extremely limited and primitive tagging system where players can drop icons on interesting creatures and treasure to let the other divers know about their location. I wasn’t always sure if other players were tagging fish they just liked, or if they were tagging important treasure or rare species that every player should make sure to catalog before the dive ended.
It’s also currently unclear how difficult it will be to find multiplayer lobbies. The only way to join a multiplayer game pre-release was by entering a six-digit Shared-Dive ID, meaning you could only play with friends you’ve communicated that code to outside of the matchmaking menu. Apparently up to 10 random divers can potentially join your online session if it isn’t full, and Nintendo has told us you should be able to join random online sessions as a solo diver as well, but that didn’t appear to be working with so few people playing ahead of launch. That leaves Luminous a wary prospect for anyone hoping to play it solo, and even if you do manage to fill up a server it will still only make its boring tasks end a little bit quicker.
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