Wavetale

Wavetale gives you movement first: a girl skimming over flooded rooftops, water, and wrecked streets, with traversal doing much of the work that combat would do elsewhere. By our assessment, that is the game’s best trick, because it makes simply getting around feel nimble and readable, and the world has a vivid, hand-made look that supports that motion. The trade-off is that the structure is lighter than in heavier action-adventure games, so the ceiling is set more by mood, pacing, and traversal than by deep systems. In practice it plays like a sequence of clean movement spaces linked by story beats. Wavetale sits closer to a charming mid-sized adventure than to a big open-world game, and the water-based movement is what makes it stand out.