Developer: Maksym Vostruhin
Publisher: Ultimate Games
Platform: Switch, PC
Tested on: Switch
Otti: The House Keeper – Review
Ultimate Games has started the new year with a plethora of new releases for the Switch, one of which is the subject of today’s review. We’re taking a look at the tower defense and puzzle hybrid, Otti: The House Keeper. We’re still not sure whether the game’s official title is Otti: The House Keeper or Otti: house keeper (without the “the” or any capital letters). Developer Maksym Vostruhin isn’t consistent with how the title is written across the various platforms. For the sake of everyone’s sanity, we’ll simply refer to the game as Otti for the remainder of the review.
Story
The titular Otti is a former thief who was cursed and is now unable to make contact with the physical world. This poses quite the challenge for Otti, as his house seems to attract all kinds of uninvited visitors. Otti needs to protect his ill-gotten gains at all costs and it is up to you, the player, to help him in this endeavor. Luckily, Otti can call upon the creatures of the afterlife, and an arsenal of traps.
The writing for Otti is, to put it lightly, quite poor. The game is riddled with spelling and grammatical errors to the point that we were almost convinced we were playing a game that was written in Chinese and then translated to English using Google Translate. As such, take the premise we’ve written above with a pinch of salt, as we’ve puzzled this together from the garbled in-game text, and there might have been a few misinterpretations on our side.
Graphics
Call us nostalgic, but we quite liked Otti’s visuals, as they are very reminiscent of Flash games of the early 2000s. The character designs are cute and the environments are varied enough to make the stages stand out. While these simplistic aesthetics might not push the capacities of the Switch, they are fine for what Otti attempts to be.
Sound
While Otti’s soundtrack is limited, what’s present here is appropriate. The mysterious nature of Otti’s house is highlighted by the leitmotif that is played on clarinet throughout the stages. Appropriately, it feels quite reminiscent of music you’d encounter in a Luigi’s mansion game. There is virtually no voice acting present, with the exception of generic screams from the thieves. Other sound effects mainly come from the various traps, and these all seem to make use of generic stock sounds.
Gameplay
Otti presents us with a hybrid between a puzzle game and a tower dense title. Each of the game’s stages takes on the shape of a different room in Otti’s sprawling mansion. Visitors will enter the room, making their way through and grabbing any valuables they’ll encounter along the way. Your aim is to defeat these thieves by setting up a series of traps and sending all kinds of creepy crawlies to hinder their attempts to steal Otti’s loot. These range from ghosts to spiders and everything in-between. A round of Otti consists of the preparation stage, where you place your traps and then a more action-oriented stage, where the thieves actually enter the room and you can interact with the various hindrances that you have at your disposal.
Traps are varied and we have to admit it is kind of fun to see how each trap plays out. There is a good degree of variation to the various rooms as well, with various layouts and theming making sure each stage feels unique. Stages never feel too complicated either, and throughout our time with the game, we felt that we were older than the target audience by quite a bit, but we imagine the game could have some real potential in the 8 to 10-year-old crowd. Some of the traps even have mini-games incorporated, adding another layer of interactivity.
Unfortunately, the ideas laid out here are better than their overall execution. The game is often slow to respond or fails to register interactions that you as the player may have with the traps. Given the overall easiness of the game, it is clear that it is intended for a very young audience, but the lack of responsiveness and poor controls make Otti more frustrating than fun to play. Things are slightly better in handheld mode than they are in docked mode, as the game supports touch screen. Sadly, this improvement isn’t significant enough to make a real difference in how enjoyable the game is.
As such, it’s difficult to recommend Otti in its current form. That’s not to say that Otti is a terrible game, as it’s quite easy to see that there is some fun to be had here, but the game would need a few serious performance updates before we could even call this title acceptable, let alone good. Things might fare better in the PC version, as the game was obviously designed for mouse input, but as we don’t have access to that version, we’re judging Otti on its merit as a Switch title.
Conclusion
We were fans of the visuals and the ideas behind Otti’s gameplay, but the execution is lacking. While the game is playable, there are too many issues present when it comes to the game’s performance and responsiveness, both when it comes to gameplay speed and when it comes to registering player input. Add to this that the in-game text is almost illegible and you’re looking at a showcase of wasted potential. If the game has piqued your interest, we highly recommend waiting for a performance patch, and should that never come, we suggest you skip the game entirely.
Otti: The House Keeper - Review,
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