Within the ever-growing world of indie video games, the place creativity typically blossoms past the constraints of huge studio expectations, Zefyr: A Thief’s Melody stands out as a vivid testomony to the ability of solo improvement and passionate storytelling. Created by Mathias Fontmarty beneath the studio title Oneiric Worlds, Zefyr just isn’t merely a sport however an invite to decelerate, discover, and savour a world crafted with care, humour, and emotional depth.
Developer: Oneiric Worlds
Writer: Oneiric Worlds
Style: Indie, 3D Platformer, Journey
Launch Date: June 2nd, 2025
Reviewed on: PC
Obtainable on: PC
Copy was offered by the developer.
Impressed by beloved classics like The Legend of Zelda: Wind Waker, Sly Cooper, and Past Good & Evil, this charming action-adventure sport provides gamers a vibrant, tranquil, and considerate journey – one that lightly subverts fashionable gaming norms in favour of coronary heart and environment.
Set throughout an exquisite archipelago, Zefyr introduces us to a whimsical universe the place thieves accumulate flowers and assist out biologists, pirates roam the skies, and historic secrets and techniques lie tucked away behind waterfalls and mountain paths. You play as Eïko, a younger thief-in-training who stumbles right into a conspiracy much more harmful than they bargained for. At first look, Eïko’s journey could look like a basic hero’s story – however Zefyr provides greater than a easy narrative arc. It’s a meditation on kindness, curiosity, and our connection to the pure world.
From the outset, the sport’s aesthetic units the tone. With a cel-shaded, pastel-infused artwork model, the visible palette looks like a watercolour portray coming to life. The character designs are stylized, nearly harking back to late PSX-era journey video games – evoking a heat nostalgia with out sacrificing fashionable polish. The vivid colors intensify the islands brimming with life, whether or not it’s birds hovering overhead, sick animals in want of therapeutic, or environmental particulars that lightly reward the observant participant. This consideration to environment doesn’t simply function a backdrop however turns into a part of the emotional vocabulary of the sport.
However aesthetics alone don’t make a compelling journey. What makes Zefyr shine is its gameplay construction, which neatly blends exploration, stealth, and puzzle-solving right into a cohesive and extremely playable expertise. Whereas Eïko can sneak previous enemies or interact them straight, the sport encourages creativity and selection, with out punishing gamers for taking a extra pacifist method. There’s an openness to its design, actually and metaphorically. Most environments enable for climbing, leaping, and grappling with shocking freedom.
This verticality makes traversal really feel fluid and empowers gamers to have interaction with the world in a approach that feels playful and liberating. There aren’t any double jumps or unlocks as you would possibly see them in most extra fashionable titles. As an alternative, you might have Zelda-style dungeons the place you clear up puzzles, are launched to new mechanics, unlock new skills, after which make the most of mentioned abilties in sensible and quite partaking methods.
Zefyr: A Thief’s Melody, nevertheless, doesn’t merely take inspiration from different video games nevertheless it additionally innovates. Maybe one in every of its most iconic mechanics – and it’s most delightfully whimsical – is the power to journey between islands by using on the again of an enormous turtle. This sluggish, light type of navigation is emblematic of the sport’s bigger ethos: Zefyr doesn’t rush you. It encourages reflection and curiosity, putting equal worth on reaching your subsequent goal and having fun with the journey alongside the way in which. In a gaming panorama typically obsessive about quick journey and high-octane motion, Zefyr provides a uncommon pause.
Moreover, the sport nonetheless permits you to use quick journey when you do certainly hurry for the following journey, nevertheless it’s a selection quite than the one viable choice, and at instances, you would possibly simply have to mix the 2 if you wish to attain a spot that isn’t accessible but.
Interwoven with its core mechanics is a way of light urgency within the story. As Eïko uncovers the layered thriller of her world – assembly vibrant characters, confronting pirates, and uncovering historic relics – she’s additionally therapeutic, studying, and rising. There’s no grim darkness or extreme cynicism right here, which makes its emotional moments land much more powerfully. The sport by no means talks right down to its gamers. As an alternative, it trusts them to have interaction with its themes, together with compassion, environmentalism, and accountability, at their very own tempo. In some ways, the sport looks like an interactive youngsters’s novel – one which, in my view, adults will discover simply as shifting, most likely.
So, to summarise my overview to this point, Zefyr: A Thief’s Melody is a sport that rewards exploration and creativity, permitting you to method conditions stealthily or head-on. Almost each wall is climbable, and the sport doesn’t actually make use of invisible partitions, which additional helps with immersion and incentivising inventive options to the number of obstacles the participant could face.
General, it’s a very polished expertise that’s well-designed each when it comes to gameplay and world-building, however regardless of that, there are just a few little nitpicks I’ve. For one, I do not know why we’re thieves, why thieves should not unhealthy guys, and what makes a painting-stealing thief higher than a plundering pirate… “Oh nicely…” These and different questions are sometimes left unanswered and I want there was simply extra lore within the sport.
One other minor challenge I had with the sport was that the music simply wouldn’t play for an excellent whereas, and it simply appeared like the sport typically forgot to loop a observe or one thing.
Outdoors of those smaller points, I did discover the sport to be pretty simple when it comes to fight. The puzzles had been all fairly neat when it comes to complexity. Not too arduous, not too simple. The candy spot. Typically issues would take me some time to determine, however they had been nonetheless very a lot enjoyable and positively jogged my memory of Zelda when it comes to design and construction. I might additionally see the inspiration the developer took from Past Good & Evil (nice sport!) with the animal cataloguing, the varied collectables, and the bo(workers)-centric fight, though I want that there was an choice to extend the problem for fight a bit.
And nicely, the animations are a bit janky at instances – however, personally, I discovered that fairly cute. It will have been neat if Eïko was at the very least doing a browsing movement or one thing on the turtle or maybe moved much less rigidly… however I don’t thoughts a little bit jank, and it gave me an excellent few chuckles alongside the way in which. I’ve seen worse from larger studios.
That mentioned, I don’t assume that these minor points outweigh the numerous positives that Zefyr: A Thief’s Melody has going for it. It’s a really well-balanced sport and a heartfelt journey that encourages exploration, empathy, and pleasure.
It’s maybe not the loudest or most groundbreaking title of its technology, nevertheless it absolutely reveals numerous soul and actually manages to convey throughout how a lot ardour and energy the only real developer behind this sport poured into it.
Zefyr: A Thief’s Melody takes numerous inspiration from different video games however looks like a lot, rather more than the sum of its elements… and greater than something, it provides a quite accessible, magical world to get misplaced in, welcoming all varieties of gamers with open arms (and an enormous turtle to experience), which I discovered quite nice.
This publish was initially written by Dan Dicere from Indiecator.
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