Olija Is an Indie Platformer Filled With Love, Loss, and Harpoons

In the middle of Olija, in a search for what you think is going to be the key for the game’s next thrilling boss fight, you’ll find yourself sword dancing with a princess in her royal estate in the middle of a misty forest, unsure whether the fight will descend into further violence or a romantic embrace. That unpredictable combination of curiously meditative, quieter moments with fast-paced platforming action makes Olija a sublime, unmissable indie title.

Skeleton Crew Studio’s Olija—largely credited to developer Thomas Olsson—is a pixelated 2D adventure game that takes its influence from mysterious, cinematic adventure games like Out of This World, though, mechanically, it is a bit more twitchy and modern like Celeste or Hades. It opens with a shipwreck that plays like a minimalist reimagining of the iconic Link’s Awakening starting cutscene.

You play as the wealthy Lord Faraday, who is looking for food to bring back to his poor village, only to get himself shipwrecked by a storm and a massive, whale-like shadow in the sea, and marooned in a foreign land along with his separated crewmates. Faraday finds an ancient, powerful harpoon that allows him to both fight his haunted, rabid foes and teleport to wherever he throws it. If you throw the harpoon into an enemy or a shadowy, sticky plant-tentacle, you can then decide whether to warp to that location—even through platforms—or to draw your harpoon back to you, slicing enemies upon its return. This becomes Faraday’s primary form of traversal. He also falls in love with the land’s princess.

Olija’s visual splendor is hard to grasp in screenshots, as much of its beauty lies in its fluid animations and its sweeping backgrounds and environmental effects. Technicolor autumnal leaves drift across the screen in some shorts, or you’ll see these drone-like birds fly away from you in a flock. There is a home base of sorts in Olija that you can visit in between levels to regain health, purchase one of the game’s few stat-boosting hats, increase your health permanently, or talk to NPCs. You’ll see ships passing in the background of shots. The NPCs are survivors of the shipwreck that you can rescue in optional puzzle zones. While the characters in Olija don’t really have faces, there is quite an impressive variety of unique animations. The alchemist who boosts your HP wakes up and throws vials of liquids everywhere when you approach him, sailors stir soups and build structures, and other characters perform other unique little activities. The base expands and becomes busier as you rescue more sailors, though I found that it plateaus about halfway through the game and the scant dialogs start to repeat.

The game’s story is simple but fabulously presented, with scenes that venture into dark fantasy and others that have the player romantically wooing the eponymously named Princess Olija. There is a memorable sweetness to these scenes. Essentially, the Rottenwood Clan of the game’s land of Terraphage has seemingly been zombified by some sort of shadowy, otherworldly entity, and now use the Faraday’s ship’s castaways as well as Olija’s clan as slave labor. The ancient Harpoon is at the center of being able to defeat this murky enemy. The game’s cutscenes are edited in a refreshing way too, with them cutting away or transitioning when you least expect it, which gives it a herky-jerky rhythm not found in other modern 2D adventures.

The lore of the islands you’ve found yourself washed up on is mercurial and the information you get throughout the game is sparsely given—its narrator speaks in an invented language, and tells the tale in the past tense, as if he already seems to know what’s going to happen. You’ll glean the most information from cutscenes after you have beaten a level or from the noncombat portions of the adventure that take place with Princess Olija at one of her royal homes. There are some bits of environmental storytelling in the backgrounds of some levels, though I found them opaque and difficult to parse. It’s a more impressionistic experience than it is an expository one. The exposition isn’t perfectly clear, and it’s likely different players will have different interpretations of the game’s story.

The physics and animations bring the player into this rich, fantastic world. Faraday’s—and the villains’—actions are impressively rendered and expressive, with a meticulous level of detail that reminded me of when I first laid my eyes on the smoothly rotoscoped and character-animation-driven Prince of Persia as a kid. There is a fencing sword that sucks you into all kinds of flowing combos, each satisfying to watch. It’s a joy to just watch Faraday climb ladders and zip across the screen to where he threw his harpoon. The game’s inky, tentacled enemies are oozing with menace and personality as well, as they climb around the screen and reach at you with their appendages. The Rottenwood Clan’s more humanoid adversaries look like more traditional enemies you’d find in any Samurai-influenced game. Items break into particles and pieces, and there are these eyeball plants that you can use as a tether for your harpoon that explode with an unnerving splat when you hit them with a weapon.

The sound design and music—a largely DIY effort by the game’s lead designer, Thomas Olsson, along with local Japanese musicians—are top notch, too. Ropes twang when you cut them, and the fighting sounds have a brutal crunchiness to them. It seems that everything you interact with has a memorable audio response. The music is grand and has an anthemic quality to it, and the composers include instruments that are seldom used in games, especially indie titles like this one, like the shamisen and saxophone. It creates an atmosphere that lifts the game experience from “platformer” to “adventure."

Olija’s traversal puzzles are satisfying, although they’re not mechanically unique to the platforming genre. However, its fighting system is loose and free-flowing, especially when using the rapier. Olija is less of a continuous sidescroller than it is a series of separate screens with their own small bits of combat or specific puzzles to solve. The game never explains your full moveset or fighting options, but part of the game’s charm is that it’s easy enough that you’ll figure it out on your own, organically. For example, you can deflect projectiles by throwing your harpoon at them. One thing that did sometimes irk me, however, is that you sometimes have to drop below a platform to a lower screen, but there’s no way to really tell if there is more of the actual level below Faraday, or if it’s a bottomless pit that will remove a good chunk of Faraday’s health.

There were also a few moments in the game where a scripted sequence had me falling through a broken platform, only to find that moving forward required me to backtrack to where that platform had been magically repaired. As in virtually any game, this kind of backtracking is needlessly tedious. Harpooning around quickly from floating eyeball to floating eyeball is never really required for the main story—it is for a few more challenging, optional sailor rescue rooms—but it feels awkward when you have to do it, and using the analog stick to change directions on the Nintendo Switch—Olija is available on Switch, Xbox One/Series X, Playstation 4/5, and for Windows on the Steam Store—Pro Controller feels imprecise. I found myself having to switch to the D-Pad for these sequences. Celeste, with its tight, easy controls, this is not.

Later in the game, Faraday gets a sword that has its own teleportation properties, and you can set up two transportation points à la Portal. Sadly, this only comes near the end of the game. I would have loved to see more puzzles that utilized both the sword and the harpoon. You also acquire two ranged weapons in the form of a shotgun and a bow, but their ammunition requires crafting. I found them to be extraneous and rather useless when matched with the enemy types that the game throws at you.

Finally, there are a handful of boss fights, but they each feel unique and are a nice culmination to their stages. The second-to-last one, in particular, has you climbing a tower while dodging the boss’ sword thrusts, and finding angles to surprise him with a smart warp or good harpoon throw. It combines everything that’s fun about using the harpoon, and lets the player figure out how they want to approach and defeat the boss. Overall, you’re waiting for a boss to show his weak spot—sometimes after launching standard Rottenwoods at you—and then going to town on it with your harpoon. They never feel cheap, but also end quickly. I liked that I could really fly around in open areas with the harpoon in these, but I couldn’t help wonder if the bosses also felt more cathartic because the game’s regular encounters are so effortless.

As a whole, Olija is on the easier side, and I found myself only really dying because of the aforementioned imprecision with the trickier airborne harpoon throwing parts. I died probably 4 times, and I never felt stuck, though one puzzle in the game had me scratching my head (in a good way.) You’ll find that you lose health very slowly outside of pitfalls, and you won’t feel overpowered by enemies. Rather, you’re compelled to keep moving forward. The levels themselves—you’ll sail to different to isolated levels in an overworld after leaving the home base—are petite. However, given that the game has no map, and it might be frustrating to try to remember all the different paths in the levels, it’s likely best enjoyed in a few dedicated sittings.

Olija is also quite short, lasting about 4 hours, but each bit of the game feels condensed to a fine morsel of quality, and you’ll never feel like the game’s run out of steam. Having said that, there isn’t much variety to the game’s combat, nor is there any sort of scoring system, variable difficulty, or New Game + and, as it is very linear, it’s unlikely you’ll return to play it again, unless you’re tempted to watch some of the game’s more beguiling story moments.

Olija is a truncated but memorable experience, one that’s worth a look from any gamer who wants to be swept away on a seafaring journey. It isn’t a trailblazing new entry in the platformer genre, but its details have a certain magic that makes it feel greater than the sum of its parts. At 15 dollars, it’s an absolute catch.