Loddlenaut

Loddlenaut has 79 negative reviews in English. I read all 79, and they are the most single-minded corpus I've encountered: 34 mention length or hours, 23 say short, 20 mention price. The critics' median playtime is 4.1 hours.

"Are you seriously charging 20$ for a 4 hour game???" asks one, at 19 votes. "I beat the game in less than 4 hours. And it's not something I will come back to for a while. Not worth the money," says another at 36.

Here's the thing: it's now NZ$8.99, down 70% from NZ$29.99. Nearly every negative review on this page is arguing about a price you can no longer pay.

What you're buying

An ocean planet ruined by a corporation, and you with a cleaning gun. You spray dissolving goop off coral, vacuum floating trash, sort it into recyclers, and gradually turn a sick green bay back into something blue. Meanwhile you feed and raise loddles — axolotl-ish creatures who imprint on you and trail behind as you work.

It is genuinely lovely to look at, and the transformation is the point: an area you first swim into choked with sludge becomes, hours later, a place with fish in it. That's the same satisfaction PowerWash Simulator sells, wrapped in the gentle collect-and-tend loop of Slime Rancher, which I reviewed earlier today.

One critic — a thumbs-down, at 24 votes — describes it more warmly than most positive reviews manage: "it's like a combination of the ocean clean-up in Coral Island and Power Wash Simulator. It's cute, easy to play, and the kind of game I love. But it's short. REALLY short."

The two criticisms that aren't about price

Re-contamination. The single most-upvoted negative, at 40 votes, isn't about length at all: "The areas you've already healed up re-contaminate over time, which just makes me feel like my progress is completely pointless."

That's a real design tension, and it's worth understanding before you buy. A game whose entire emotional payload is making a dirty thing clean has chosen to make the dirt come back. There's a defensible reason — it keeps the world active and gives you something to do — but it works directly against the feeling the game is selling, and it's telling that the person who noticed disengaged from the pet mechanics as a result.

It doesn't develop. Upgrade appears in 16 of 79, and a 3.6-hour reviewer articulates it: the game "never really g[oes anywhere]." You get better tools, but the activity they're applied to doesn't change. Progression scores a 5.5 for that, and it's why replayability is a 4.

The abruptness compounds it. A 16-vote reviewer: "When the game was in the ending sequence, I legitimately thought I was starting the second level."

The numbers behind the shortness

The achievement curve confirms it plainly: 23 achievements, the most common at 85.9%, the median held by 49.8% of players, and the rarest still at 12%. Half of everyone who buys this finishes half of it — one of the flattest distributions I've measured, and exactly what a short, gentle, completable game looks like.

Negatives by year run 8, 40, 17, 14 — concentrated in 2024, its first full year on sale at full price. Recent English reviews sit at 98 of 100 positive with an 8.6-hour median, double the critics'.

A pattern worth naming

This is the third game today whose central complaint is length against price — after Stray and Marvel's Spider-Man: Miles Morales — and in all three the objection came from players who finished the game and then looked at the receipt.

In all three, a discount resolves it. That's worth saying out loud, because a store page full of angry reviews about value can be describing a price that no longer exists. Check the current number before you take the reviews at face value.

The verdict

Loddlenaut earns a 7. It's a well-made, warm, visually lovely little game that does exactly what it promises for four to six hours and then stops.

It doesn't score higher because the loop never deepens, because the ending lands before it feels earned, and because re-contamination quietly undermines the one feeling the whole game exists to produce. Those are design choices, not bugs, and they cap what it can be.

But at NZ$8.99 the argument that dominates its review page has largely expired. Put an evening aside, clean up an ocean, and let a small alien creature follow you around while you do it. That's worth nine dollars.