Out of the Blue and Raw Fury have announced a release date for Call of the Sea on PS4 and PS5. As it turns out, it’s tomorrow and a new launch trailer is available to celebrate the occasion. Check it out below.

Released in December 2020 for Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S and PC, Call of the Sea is set in the 1930s and follows Norah as she ventures to an island in the South Pacific. Searching for her missing husband, she happens upon various mysteries and attempts to unravels the island’s secrets. By exploring the environment and piecing together different clues, she may just learn the truth.

Inspired by H.P. Lovecraft’s works, Call of the Sea is envisioned as less of a descent into madness and more about Norah’s “rise to sanity.” For more details, you can check out our review here. It’s also been rated for the Nintendo Switch in Taiwan so stay tuned for more details on a potential release date announcement.

Raw Fury and Out of the Blue released their first person adventure title Call of the Sea in December last year. Back then, it only launched as an Xbox console exclusive across both generations of the ecosystem, alongside a PC version, but the game’s been taking steps to let more players in. PS5 and PS4 versons were recently announced, and it seems the game might also be headed for the Switch.

As spotted by Gematsu on Twitter, Call of the Sea recently received an age rating in Taiwan. Though that’s obviously not an official confirmation, premature age ratings have often been precursors to announcements. Call of the Sea is a game that would be very well suited to the Switch, too, and not just because it’s an indie game, so an announcement wouldn’t surrprise us.

Right now, Call of the Sea is available on Xbox Series X/S, Xbox One, and PC, and launches for PS5 and PS4 some time this month, with a specific date not yet confirmed. You can read our review of the game through here.

PS4 version of Godfall and Switch version of Call of the Sea have been rated in Taiwan. Both are unannounced.

PS4 version of Godfall was previously rated in Europe: https://t.co/McyjquQWuo pic.twitter.com/fIdNqqhcKu

— Gematsu (@gematsu) May 6, 2021

Following several teases, Out of the Blue has announced that Call of the Sea will be coming to PlayStation. It’s set to release in May for PS5 and PS4 as per an official tweet. A more concrete release date should be revealed in the coming weeks.

Launching this past December for Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S and PC, the first person adventure title is set in the 1930s and follows Norah. Having ventured to an island in the Southern Pacific, she’s searching for her missing husband. The island holds its share of secrets though and Norah will need to solve puzzles and gather notes to discover the truth.

Taking inspiration from H.P. Lovecraft works, Call of the Sea received some decent critical acclaim at launch. You can check out our review here for more details. Those who have Xbox Game Pass can also try it now. Stay tuned for more details and updates in the meantime.

We are excited to announce that Call of the Sea is coming to PS4 and PS5 in May 2021! pic.twitter.com/CFhCCu9E6H

— Call of the Sea (@COTSGame) April 13, 2021

NOTE: This interview was conducted prior to the game’s launch.

"We were inspired by the strong visuals of games like Firewatch, The Witness, and Sea of Thieves. We wanted to create a beautiful place where people want to stay and enjoy spending hours solving puzzles and exploring every corner."

Call of the Sea sports a striking art style that makes a very strong first impression. Can you talk us through the process of how you landed on this aesthetic for the game?

As a small indie studio, we wanted to create a game that would be visually striking and unique. We wanted to stand out, particularly alongside the next-gen games that tend to be hyper realistic.

We were inspired by the strong visuals of games like Firewatch, The Witness, and Sea of Thieves. We wanted to create a beautiful place where people want to stay and enjoy spending hours solving puzzles and exploring every corner.

How much of an emphasis does Call of the Sea place on exploration? What kind of a balance does it strike between that and puzzle solving?

Exploration is strongly tied with puzzle solving. We are inspired by games like Myst or Riven, where you need to explore and gather as much information as possible to understand how the world and the mechanisms that you find work.

We put a lot of effort into environmental storytelling, and the player will have to find clues and put all of them together to figure out what happened to the expedition… On the other hand, when we design puzzles, we want them to be integrated into the world as part of the environment.

What’s your approach been to puzzle design in the game, especially when it comes to striking a balance between challenge and accessibility?

We wanted to make puzzles a bit easier than the ones you could find in the Myst series games, to make the game more accessible for a wider audience, while also keeping it challenging enough to be a strong puzzle game. To achieve that, we did a lot of internal playtesting to tune the difficulty as much as possible.

Although Call of the Sea is a puzzle game, I would also say it is the narrative that drives it. Therefore puzzles serve the narrative and advance the story as a reward for solving them.

What can you tell us about the island where the game is set, and what players can expect from it in terms of size and variety?

We have crafted very detailed environments for the players to explore at their own pace. In terms of the pacing and gameplay progression, we have divided the game into chapters to allow us to tune the environments and weather, and make the setting evolve as the story does. When we design games we have players’ emotions in mind. Although there is a linear story to be told, in each chapter there will be areas and environments that the player can explore as they want to.

"We have crafted very detailed environments for the players to explore at their own pace. In terms of the pacing and gameplay progression, we have divided the game into chapters to allow us to tune the environments and weather, and make the setting evolve as the story does."

Call of the Sea supposedly takes cues from H.P. Lovecraft’s works, but you’ve said that it’s not a horror game. What kind of influences, then, did you look to Lovecraft’s works for?

We wanted to keep the essence of the classic H.P. Lovecraft stories while at the same time giving it a different approach. Not a pulp one, like the Call of Cthulhu tabletop rpg, but not a cosmic horror either. So instead of having a passive subject that is drawn into madness by circumstances that he/she cannot control, our purpose is to tell a story of a resolute woman, involved in a mystery, and a journey of discovery and acceptance. While most Lovecraft stories are a descent to madness, Call of the Sea is a rise to sanity.

It seems like Call of the Sea’s narrative has two sides to it, with one focusing on Norah’s personal arc and character, and the other having this more mysterious tilt to it and its setting. How does the game balance those two sides?

As Norah explores the island she will learn things about the fate of the expedition, and what Harry learned about her illness. And in the process of understanding this, she will also learn things about herself. We could say that both stories unravel at the same time.

Cissy Jones, the voice actor for Nora, is an industry veteran with years of experience under her belt. What does her involvement in the game bring to the table, specifically where Nora’s character is concerned?

We adored her acting in Firewatch and her ability to create a strong presence with only her voice. She is an immensely talented actress and was able to build the complexity of a character and her emotional journey even if we never see her on screen. We already received many comments about how people cried because of the game, and I’m sure it is because of her fantastic performance.

Roughly how long will an average playthrough of Call of the Sea be?

It depends on how much time you dedicate to puzzles and to exploring all the environments, but we calculate that it will be between 5 to 7 hours.

"As Norah explores the island she will learn things about the fate of the expedition, and what Harry learned about her illness. And in the process of understanding this, she will also learn things about herself. We could say that both stories unravel at the same time."

Call of the Sea was one of the first games to be announced for the Xbox Series X, but it’s also coming to the Xbox One. What was the process like of optimizing the game for both machines, while also ensuring that the specs of Xbox One S didn’t limit your vision for a game that’s also coming to the far more powerful Series X?

The artists and programming team did a fantastic job optimizing the game for both consoles. We wanted the Xbox Series X to shine because we were allowed to add an incredible amount of details and richness to the environment. But always keeping an eye on the Xbox One version so it was still as beautiful as possible, as well. For us it is very important that every player has a good experience.

Call of the Sea is launching as an Xbox console exclusive, but do you have any plans to eventually bring the game to PlayStation 5?

Right now, we’re very much focused on our partnership with Microsoft for the Xbox range. We think the new generation of hardware brings amazing opportunities across the board however, and we never rule anything out.

What was the reason behind launching as an Xbox console exclusive?

We are happy to work with MS as a partner for bringing Call of the Sea to the world, and we are excited with the opportunities next-gen formats bring. We’re also very happy to be part of Xbox Game Pass; that has proven to give us a lot of visibility!

Can you talk about the resolutions and frame rates the game is targeting?

We are targeting 4k and 60fps on Xbox Series X.

"We are happy to work with MS as a partner for bringing Call of the Sea to the world, and we are excited with the opportunities next-gen formats bring."

The Xbox Series X has a ton of GPU horsepower and fast SSD. How do you think this will help developers as they develop games for the next 7-8 years?

It is always exciting to see how old limitations are overcome and try to find new ones. The feeling of adventure when exploring something new is what we like best.

Do you think Series S will limit game development given that it’s a technically inferior machine compared to Series X?

It depends on the game. I think in our case it hasn’t been a limitation at all.

Out of the Blue’s first person puzzle adventure Call of the Sea is now available for Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S and PC players. It’s also live for Xbox Game Pass subscribers. Check out the launch trailer below to see how it looks.

Call of the Sea follows Norah who ventures to a strange island in the Southern Pacific in search of her husband. Set in the 1930s, the main crux of the experience is exploring the island and solving puzzles to progress forward while learning the truth of the expedition. Though it’s not a horror game, Call of the Sea has been heavily inspired by Lovecraft’s works.

For more information on the game, you can check out our official review here. Though Call of the Sea hasn’t explicitly been confirmed as an exclusive for Xbox platforms, the development team is unable to comment on a possible PS5 version. Stay tuned for more details on that front in the coming months.

Call of the Sea is developer Out of the Blue’s first title as a standalone studio and walks a line between a narrative-focused walking simulator and a puzzle-filled dive into a mysterious island, sometimes blatantly alternating between the two. The walking simulator aspect follows in the proverbial footsteps of those that came before it, most notably Firewatch. As you join the protagonist Norah on her mission, you’re told very little about what she knows and who she’s following, only that she has a long-term illness and is following the trail of her husband’s expedition on an unknown island in the 1930’s. Of course, nothing with that expedition went according to plan, so Norah is there to sort out what happened and experience many of their troubles for herself, primarily doing so by following where they set up camp, reading their letters, rummaging through what they left behind.

"Less enjoyable puzzle games are less transparent about their systems, excusing unclear mechanics and subpar signposting as further methods of challenge. Call of the Sea falls in that category."

As walking simulators go, Call of the Sea is surprisingly intriguing for such a run-of-the-mill formula. It doesn’t do much that other games haven’t done, but its story plays out and unfolds over the course of each chapter in a way that rewards you for paying attention to a lot of different details. Very few single letters or remains give you that much detail themselves, but scouring every corner for new details is rewarding to figure out the fate of the expedition and see some unforgettable things for yourself. It’s also backed by a great performance by Cissy Jones of Firewatch fame, whose voice carries you through Norah’s mindset, though her repeated talking to herself can sometimes feel like a forced way to reveal necessary details, as she’s not meant to be recording or broadcasting to anyone else. The environments also give the game a beautiful and stylistically diverse series of settings to distinguish each chapter. One chapter takes place on a bright, sandy orange beach, while the next atop a mountain on a stormy, purple night. It’s always impressive to look at, and, while the puzzles could have been implemented more into the environment itself, it’s not a bad source of eye candy.

While not obvious out of the gate, Call of the Sea is heavily Lovecraftian, implementing some of the trademark aspects of H.P. Lovecraft’s works and supernatural influences into its world and characters, though it is definitely not a horror game. Some of the game’s best moments are when these influences are made most clear in how they make the environment increasingly awe-inspiring and impressive, as well as how they allow the characters, specifically Norah, to become more complex, emotionally. Every so often, the game will interrupt itself to put Norah into a confusing, otherworldly situation with no explanation and free from puzzles, her only goal to reach the end and figure out what she’s being told. I really enjoyed these sequences because, even though they’re short and infrequent, they add a lot of diversity to the way the story is told and free the game from the constraints it puts on itself to create its puzzle-filled environments.

The puzzles, the other half of the gameplay coin, are decidedly more inconsistent, often devolving to frustratingly obtuse. Each of the game’s chapters has one or two large-scale primary puzzles that you’re tasked with solving to both learn more about the lost expedition and move deeper into the island. Many puzzles have a handful of steps to get to the ultimate larger solution. These usually come in the form of turning on the power or finding a handful of related diagrams around the environment. The best of the game’s puzzles utilize its chapter’s contained environments and cleverly hide clues in understandable but not obvious locations, both in notes the crew left behind and in the environment itself, without giving too much away with a single clue. These types of puzzles let the game’s story flourish, too, because each puzzle is meant to have been connected to the expedition’s crew in some way, allowing you to literally follow their actions and giving you a deeper understanding of what they went through.

"Every so often, the game will interrupt itself to put Norah into a confusing, otherworldly situation with no explanation and free from puzzles, her only goal to reach the end and figure out what she’s being told. I really enjoyed these sequences because, even though they’re short and infrequent, they add a lot of diversity to the way the story is told and free the game from the constraints it puts on itself to create its puzzle-filled environments."

As the game progresses and the puzzles are meant to be more difficult, though, they start to fall apart and completely take you out of the experience. One of the game’s primary tenets for each chapter is that most or all of the environment is accessible from the beginning. Infrequently there will be a door or elevator that takes you to a previously locked-off area, but you’re usually able to get anywhere you need to go right away, which could be great for speedrunners but is inherently flawed for casual players. The sequence of actions that you have to complete to gather every clue is usually deducible, like having to turn on the power before using the electrical speakers, but the moment that this predetermined series of actions stops being inherently clear, it becomes a guessing game as to when you have enough information to solve the area’s major puzzle.

A major source of this dissonance comes because of how ingrained the story is to the puzzles. You often see the progress the people there before you made, but without telling you, this work is often wrong and, sometimes, completely off base. It’s almost as if some of the notes lying around the environment are there just to throw you off until you get further into the level. This becomes a problem, though, because the game is almost unforgivably bad at signposting and offering guidance as to when you have more of the level to discover. If you don’t have an inherent understanding of the intended sequence of actions, it’s more a game of interacting with every object until something happens than following a natural progression in the level design or being able to deduce where to go next in context, and the puzzles themselves often become more about guessing and checking rather than deducing and understanding, which takes much of the satisfaction out of solving the puzzles.

As such, the signposting is almost nonexistent. I was faced multiple times with crucial pieces of information that I missed because they were hidden in or behind easily missable doors that had little reason to return to the area. It was only when I began to take myself out of the experience that I realized the empty notebook slot was likely another clue. An objective marker or even an occasional line from Norah about needing more information would have easily solved this problem, but as is, the puzzles are already frustratingly obtuse, and the game’s lack of respect for your time and willingness to send you on a long, fruitless journey overshadows much of what makes its story interesting.

"An objective marker or even an occasional line from Norah about needing more information would have easily solved this problem, but as is, the puzzles are already frustratingly obtuse, and the game’s lack of respect for your time and willingness to send you on a long, fruitless journey overshadows much of what makes its story interesting."

The best aspects of Call of the Sea are often the most fleeting. The beautiful scenery, intriguing story, and entrancing puzzle-free sequences alone would make it a great experience, but the puzzles it presents too often take you completely out of the experience and dampen what the game does well. The combination of the game’s lack of signposting, unclear level design, and overall preference for obtuse puzzles that encourage guessing over deduction put Call of the Sea on either side of itself. When the game is firing on all cylinders and puts you in a spot to think critically, it’s satisfying and endearing, but once its puzzles start breaking down, it’s all the game can do to stop from folding in on itself.

This game was reviewed on the Xbox Series X.

Update: Raw Fury and developer Out of the Blue have confirmed that Call of the Sea will release on December 8th. It will be available for Xbox Series X/S, Xbox One and PC along with Game Pass. Steam and GOG users can also pick it up for $19.99 on their respective platforms. Check out the announcement trailer below.

Original Story:

Remember Raw Fury’s Call of the Sea, the first person adventure mystery announced way back in May? Announced for Xbox One, Xbox Series X and PC, it was slated to release this year. Thankfully, unlike Twelve Minutes, it hasn’t been quietly delayed – a Microsoft Store listing indicates that it will launch on December 8th.

The story is set in 1934 with Norah venturing the South Pacific to a mysterious island to find her husband. As she explores various ruins and other mysteries, Norah will have to investigate various clues and eventually discover the truth. Along with running at 4K, Call of the Sea will have support for ray-tracing, Smart Delivery and 120 FPS.

Of course, it’s also coming to Xbox Game Pass, though whether PC subscribers can also get their hands on it remains to be seen. Expect an official announcement on the release date from the publisher soon. Stay tuned for more details in the meantime.

Among the many new third party games to be announced for the Xbox Series X at the recent gameplay showcase for the console (which was surprisingly short on gameplay), one looked particularly intriguing- developer Out of the Blue and publisher Raw Fury’s adventure title, Call of the Sea.

With its interesting narrative premise, focus on puzzles and exploring a lush, mysterious location, and the vibrant art style and visual design, it definitely looks like a game that we’re going to want to keep an eye on in the coming months. Like a few other games announced during the show though, Call of the Sea so far is confirmed to be a console exclusive for the Xbox family- so is a PS5 release planned?

Well, not currently. Or if it is, the people behind the game aren’t willing to talk about it. Publishers Raw Fury recently responded to Push Square’s question about the same, saying that they have nothing further to announce for now. “[There is] o further information regarding releases on other consoles,” they said.

Either they simply don’t have anything to talk about for now, or they’re unwilling to talk about a PS5 version just yet, seeing as the console and its lineup are yet to receive a proper reveal. Either way, for all practical purposes, in the here and now, a PS5 version of Call of the Sea is not going to be a thing.

When it does launch later this year, it will be available on Xbox Series X, Xbox One, and PC.

Out of the Blue’s Call of the Sea was one of many Xbox-exclusive titles announced recently, presenting an “otherworldly” adventure set in the 1930s. Set to release in late 2020, it focuses on Norah as she arrives on a strange island looking for her missing husband. Check out the trailer below.

As a mystery adventure game, Call of the Sea focuses on exploration and puzzle-solving. There’s a hint of transforming into a merwoman to traverse the depths. With a lost civilization seemingly being present long ago, what other secrets could the island hold and what’s become of Norah’s husband?

Call of the Sea is currently slated to release for Xbox One, Xbox Series X and PC. It’s developed on Unreal Engine 4, thus explaining the fetching visuals, and features the Cissy Jones of Firewatch and The Walking Dead: Season 1 frame as the voice of Norah. Stay tuned for more details on the title in the coming months.