WordPlayer: Wide Ocean Big Jacket Is A Perfect One-Hour Game

A popular way to open an article about an interesting piece of media goes something like this: "There's a moment in X where Y happens. Here's what it made me realize/how it made me feel." It's a good entry point, not only because it illustrates something about the experience, but because it lets the author connect their emotional tether to the work right away. You tell the reader about this moment, and in the process, you're drawn back into it yourself. In some cases, the moment you share is the one when you realized that the game was special.

For me, Wide Ocean Big Jacket - a short, sweet game about two adults and two children who go camping over a weekend - is twenty-or-so such opening anecdotes stitched together. There's a moment in Wide Ocean Big Jacket where young protagonists Mord and Ben encounter a group of what the game assures us are "Mean Teens". There's a moment in Wide Ocean Big Jacket where one character tells the others a surprising horror story. There's a moment where the two adult characters, Cloanne and Brad, must decide whether or not to let their discussion simmer over into an argument. Stitch all of these moments together and you have a full game where nothing really happens but everything feels impactful.

I don't remember what prompted me to pick up Wide Ocean Big Jacket back when it launched on Switch, but I remember the dawning sense that it was something I liked. I am not sure at what point I realized that I, in fact, fully loved it. I know it happened within an hour because that's about how long it takes to hit the ending. And since then the four central characters have occupied a small space in my heart, setting their tent up and roasting wieners on the fire so that the smell sometimes wafts up to my brain.

"Stitch all of these moments together and you have a full game where nothing really happens but everything feels impactful."

Wide Ocean Big Jacket is a tiny narrative game about a couple, Brad and Cloanne, who have taken Brad's 13-year-old niece Mord and her boyfriend Ben away on a camping trip for the weekend. There are no huge revelations, no twists or subversions of genre or anything like that. You control all four characters at various points, and when they speak the screen displays their face and text over a black background. The animation is done with few frames, and the world is rendered in limited, blocky polygon shapes. It's absolutely gorgeous.

Many of the games I really love have a distinct voice, and Wide Ocean Big Jacket's sense of irreverent nostalgia feels unique from the nostalgia in other games - in part, perhaps, because it feels very modern. It's a celebration not so much of camping, but of the idea of camping - of what happens when you step away from the "real world" for a little while and live what feels like a short, separate little life. It's not an escape, it's a vacation, and that's how Wide Ocean Big Jacket feels, too. It's a little stopgap from the wider world of games, a calm little island that doesn't ask too much from you. There are no puzzles to solve or challenges to traverse. You're here to enjoy the characters, the art, the little slice of a world that the game has carved out. It's a holiday you can go on whenever you have a spare hour.

A huge part of Wide Ocean Big Jacket's power is in how short it is, how little time you have with these characters. It gives every choice the game makes an extra layer of significance, and you feel like you can capture the whole thing in your head. The dialogue and writing - the game contains 10,000 words of text, but feels much smaller than that - is evocative throughout. A text prompt might welcome you to "POP A SQUAT" or "PEE IN THE BUSH". At one point, as you roast hot dogs, the text prompt to progress the story just reads "OH YEAH BAY-BE".

"It's a celebration not so much of camping, but of the idea of camping - of what happens when you step away from the "real world" for a little while and live what feels like a short, separate little life."

The script is extremely economical in explaining who these characters are, and what their relationships with each other look like. Cloanne and Ben are more serious-minded, more introspective, but informed by different experiences and desires; Cloanne is a capital-A Adult, whereas Ben seems young for 13, projecting real "this child must be protected" energy. Mord, with her bright-pink elbows and spindly limbs, simply wants to absorb everything, to talk to everyone, and has no sense of how annoying she might be. Brad is in his element, quietly thrilled to be camping with his niece. The real meat of the game comes from observing them, thinking about how they fit together, enjoying their antics. There's not a lot to do in Wide Ocean Big Jacket, but that never feels like a problem. You can imagine the lives these characters came from, and the ones they're returning to, largely unchanged by the low-stakes weekend they've just enjoyed.

The dialogue does not follow any specific grammatical rules - Cloanne is the most grammatically formal of them all, whereas Mord and Ben are carried by the sort of vibes that will be familiar to anyone who has spent too much time online. "(ha ha i can not believe you yelled back)", Ben whispers to Mord after encountering the Mean Teens. Later, as he starts to panic about being away from camp as night sets in, he exclaims his fears in perfect Twitter-speak: "I Guess I Just Feel Weird How Dark It's Getting". It feels like these characters are in a group chat, which gives you, as a player, the feeling of having been invited into something personal and exclusive. When Mord uses the wrong "it's", I like to think it's not a typo, that's just her style.

This is the sort of thing that's very difficult to get right, a balance that few games manage - go too hard and it feels like a focus-grouped bit, not hard enough and it feels insincere. But Wide Ocean Big Jacket's dialogue is so sweet, so considered, so evocative. It means that the game can take you anywhere - into any of the moments that might have made for a good article opener.

Wide Ocean Big Jacket is a one-off story, with no branching paths, no meaningful player choices, no big hidden surprises beyond a few interactions you might miss. There's an extra little story that was added in a post-launch update - and also released as a standalone demo on PC - but the core game is just a small and beautiful thing. At one point in the game, Ben sums it all up: "(It's) like I'm living a 'Full Life' but just smaller." That's Wide Ocean Big Jacket - it's camping. A full life, but small.