Approximate amount of time to 100%: 15h+
Estimated achievement difficulty: 4/10
Minimum number of playthroughs needed: 1 with savescum, otherwise multiple
Is there a good guide available: Not yet. I made a start for a map guide, just to help others get through it and maybe build further on it. you can find it
here Multiplayer achievements: No
Missable achievements: Yes, multiple. It doesn't help that after fighting the last boss you are stuck around that area and can't go back exploring. But even without that, there are achievements for multiple endings.
Grinding Achievements: Not really, you'll have leveled up all the characters around the ending which is the most grindy achievement
DLC-Only achievements: No
Speedrun achievements: No
Time-gated achievements: No
RNG-achievements: No
Does difficulty affect achievements: No difficulty settings in the game, except that the game is easier with multiple players because you can resurrect each other
Unobtainable/glitched achievements: No
I have a bit of a hard time writing this. I think Curse of the Sea Rats is a good game and it is quite addictive as I came back to it. Although in the period before the release, there were quite some bugs and it seems that the development team was a bit thin-spread with a local gaming fair the week before and also having to ship the physical Kickstarter copies themself. I understand that with a small team, there is only so much that you can do in a short amount of time, but I hope the team will be able to fix the bugs found by the community.
There were some things that made my playthrough less enjoyable:
- Something with a sidequest with a bone that can screw you up quite badly, can't say much more because of spoilers
- The gold chests give a food item that can heal you a little bit, this felt quite underwhelming for a chest item, and being able to buy better items in the shop
- The spirit that helps you during the game is such a grumpy grandpa, I wanted to ignore him but after dying for the X amount of time in a short time and him telling me how much I suck didn't help
- And last but not least, the wind area is such a challenging area when playing solo, because getting blown off a platform, or getting attacked by the penguin birds and getting thrown off the platform is instant death, while in multiplayer you have a chance that the other player can revive you
However, even having experienced already quite a few of the things above in the beginning, I kept coming back to the game to play more. So it was quite an addictive game and I'm glad I played through it. I hope the devs will tweak a bit of the things above, although I can also see some of them are part of the core of the game.
The game has quite a lot of missable achievements because of all the different endings. And as written above, to make it a bit worse is that you can't go back to explore the map further after defeating the last boss. On PC you can save scum your game from time to time to go back to an earlier spot in the game (C:\Users\XXX\AppData\LocalLow\Petoons Studio\Curse Of The Sea Rats), on consoles you'll really have to play through the game multiple times.
I do recommend Curse of the Sea Rats if you enjoy metroidvania and especially if you want to play with others through it. As an achievement hunter, you'll have a challenge with unlocking all the achievements, although a good guide (which I'm sure someone will make) will help out a lot.
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