Before seeing it at last year’s The Game Awards, Sea of Remnants wasn’t actually on my radar yet, and this is shocking because it’s basically the perfect mix of things I like. It has turn-based JRPG combat, rhythm/music elements, and it’s set in a pirate setting. Sounds like a recipe for success for me!
The gamescom booth looks GLORIOUS, by the way, and it was by far one of the coolest setpieces of the entire show floor. It’s a giant mermaid, and she’s also the main boss we fight in the demo, and boy, was it a doozy. To frame the demo first: We’re given a party of 4 max-leveled characters (capped at lvl 20) and we’re presumably rather deep into the game at this point already. I could explore the open world a bit and fought a single turn-based battle in which I had NO idea what I was doing other than choosing attacks from a list of commands, and made my way into a cave where the mermaid lay slumbering. Enter: an epîc boss battle.
The Mermaid boss immediately makes it clear how much music plays a role in the game. Not only are a lot of my sailor’s attacks musically themed, but the mermaid is also singing a soft hymn the entire time. She uses her beautiful voice to summon two mermaid statues by her side to fight with her. I’m trained enough in JRPGs to know it’s probably wise to take out the aids first, and so I did. My major gripe with the demo is that it was hard to figure out just what the heck I was doing. Each character had around 3 abilities to pick from (there is no basic attack) and a defend option. No “use item to heal” in sight. I pick an ability and there is a lot of text I don’t fully understand yet. It turned out I can “boost” my attacks by rolling dice, and for some reason, almost every attack I did with 1 character also provoked an assist from 1 or 2 other characters in my party. It felt like I could take 6-7 turns of dishing out damage before the opposing boss could even make a move.
The attacks look absolutely fantastic, but the animations are rather long, or at least, they will gradually start to feel longer as you watch them play out for the 100th time. So I hope the full game will have a setting to turn them off, or have a shorter version. The gameplay is purely turn-based by the way, there is no timed parry or dodge system, as we’ve seen in Expedition 33. So for 2026’s standards, it feels pretty old-school. But then I came close to beating the boss, and as soon as her health became critical, her swooning chants turned into heavy metal music, and the color spectrum on screen changed to mostly deep reds, and it was such a rush. I truly love how the music, and even the lyrics, play a role here. I’m a sucker for that in games.
I defeated the boss and used my remaining time to explore the island a bit. There are a ton of things you can pick up, for crafting items or restoring your health in between fights ( I presume, the demo restored my health to full after each fight, so the campfires on the map served little purpose) I do have to admit the open world was struggling to load everything in. I saw textures load, the clouds flicker, and it just didn’t look as good as the combat did. And this was on a PC.
I also found my way back to the boat somehow, which felt like something the demo didn’t intend for me to do, but that made it clear we’ll also have Black Flag-like naval combat. I quickly got my ass kicked by 3 ships I tried to face off against, but I did find a colourful balloon fish which triggered a shooting gallery minigame.
All in all, I spent around 40 minutes in the Gamescom demo and had a blast. I’m really looking forward to the release next year, but I don’t see how this could be a free-to-play title, because it just feels like a single-player RPG from everything I’ve seen and played.
Robby lives and breathes video games. When he’s not playing them, he’s talking about them on social media or convincing other people to pick up a controller themselves. He’s online so often, he could practically list the internet as his legal domicile. Belgian games-industry know-it-all.
