Ocean Planet

Ocean Planet released in full on Steam on June 27, 2026, from small developer Nonsense Machine, a free beat-'em-up in which two friends, Button and Drop Bear, fend off trouble in the beach town of Motley while scavenging ingredients to cook dishes at their steam bun shop, all while investigating a missing friend. Its 13-review English pool sits at Positive (12 up, 1 down, 92%), and the reviews describe a small, free, visually striking oddity that reads less like a finished game and more like a beautifully made proof of concept, one that a real chunk of the pool explicitly acknowledged as such.

Art direction and music are the pool's one completely uncontested strength, praised in every single review that mentions them at all. The pool's most detailed reviewer opened with exactly that: "the art style is distinctive and cool. The music is remarkably good, jazzy/funky and sounds entirely handmade. I don't typically enjoy videogame music. I just kinda tolerate or ignore it. But this I left at full volume in settings." A separate reviewer, far more briefly but no less enthusiastically, called it "insanely good art, animation and music," while another simply said "Sal's art is so good!" The character designs draw specific, repeated praise too, with one reviewer suggesting "there should be a cartoon series made out of this."

The genre mashup itself, beat-'em-up combat stitched to short-order cooking, is where the reviews get more clear-eyed about the game's actual scope. The same detailed reviewer who praised the music was upfront that "the game (it's a demo, essentially) is worth a bit of money as it is, just saying," and went on to wonder aloud about features that clearly aren't in the current build: "would the food turn into power-ups? Would it only be used as items to trader for access to levels and areas? Would there be more playable characters as the story moved forward?" That's a reviewer actively filling in gaps the game itself doesn't answer, a telling sign of a short, unfinished-feeling scope rather than a complete design. A second reviewer made a similar point more concretely, writing that "with how short the game is, the existence of 2 unique playable characters feels a bit unnecessary, but is clearly planning for the future," and adding bluntly that "the short length is absolutely the reason why the cooking aspect of the game feels forced."

That said, the parts that are here land well with most players, even in their current small-scale form. One reviewer described the appeal simply: "i like how you can beat up things, and then also cook stuff. its a cool combination of two types of game," while another summarized it as "a fun jammin cooking beat em up" with "awesome characters" and "rad tunes." A third reviewer who logged real time with it, rather than the many zero-hour drop-in reviews in the pool, praised "insanely good art, animation and music" specifically after actually playing rather than simply sampling. None of these reviews are lengthy, but their consistency, virtually every reviewer hits the same notes on art, music, and the novelty of the combat-cooking mix, does suggest the core creative idea genuinely lands, even if the game around it doesn't yet have much substance to it.

Two independent bug reports are worth flagging directly rather than treating as a single complaint. One player wrote simply and bluntly, "softlocked because of fridge, unplayble," a specific, checkable progress-blocking bug involving the game's cooking-station fridge object. A separate reviewer independently confirmed combat-related technical problems, writing "whilst there are several bugs mainly involving combat which currently restrict me from progressing, I'd recommend this game," still landing on a positive recommendation despite being unable to finish it. Two different players hitting two different progress-blocking bugs in a game this short is a real, corroborated concern for anyone hoping to actually complete it in one sitting.

Because it's free and clearly short, most of the pool's reviewers were forgiving about the overall lack of substance, framing Ocean Planet less as a disappointing full release and more as an exciting taste of something bigger to come. "Keep going, devs," wrote the pool's most detailed reviewer, echoing a sentiment repeated in different words throughout the pool. That's a reasonable reaction to a free, clearly early-stage piece of work, but it's also a fair signal to prospective players that they should adjust their expectations accordingly rather than expecting a fully realized game.

It's also worth being honest about what the review pool itself looks like, since it matters for how much weight the 92% figure should carry. Most of the thirteen English reviews are extremely brief, a sentence or two of enthusiasm with no recorded playtime beyond a few minutes, and only two or three engage with the game in any real evaluative depth. That's typical of a small, free, jam-scale release that spreads quickly through word of mouth rather than one that's been stress-tested by a large, skeptical audience. None of that means the praise is unearned, the art and music genuinely are that well-received across the board, but a 92% score built on a dozen short, largely uncritical reviews is a different kind of signal than the same score on a large, thoroughly tested game, and it's worth reading it that way rather than as a definitive verdict on the final product's quality.

Taken together, Ocean Planet is a strikingly well-art-directed, well-scored curiosity built around a genuinely novel idea that simply isn't fleshed out yet, hampered further by at least two independently reported bugs that can block progress outright. As a free, twenty-to-thirty-minute sample of a distinctive visual and musical style, it's an easy, low-risk try; as a complete game in its own right, it isn't one yet, and prospective players should go in with a demo's expectations rather than a finished product's.