Compass Review: Fly The Friendly Skies

I’ve been riding motorcycles since I was a kid. Last year, I went back to basics and bought an old British motorcycle from an even older man, then spent six months bringing it back to life. My 1967 BSA A65 is light, nimble, and simple. It has no safety features, no anti-lock brakes, no computers. The thing doesn’t even have turn signals. What it does have is a motor, two wheels, and a seat: everything you need to roll down the road at 95 miles per hour and nothing more.

Compass is like that. It’s uncomplicated, a bit sparse, and as a video game, unapologetically simple. But it’s also endearing, unique, and like my favorite bike, a whole lot of fun.

What Is Compass?

Though it may sound reductive, Compass is a game about flying. While it’s true that Compass tells a story, that it’s full of NPCs and quests, that there are puzzles to solve and cosmetics to earn and a ship to upgrade, all of this is secondary. At its core, Compass is all about exploring the skies.

You play as a scout, guiding and supporting an airborne caravan of anthropomorphic alien animals as it treks across a cosmic skyscape on a quest to deliver a giant egg to “the great incubator” while outrunning the attacks of an enormous space whale. It sounds odd, and that’s because it is odd. Delightfully so.

The gameplay loop is essentially this: you fly to the central hub of an open-world area, chat with some NPCs, accept some quests, then explore the map in your ship. Throughout the overworld you’ll find crystals which can be harvested and used to unlock areas shrouded in mist, within which are contained the game’s out-of-cockpit traversal puzzles. You’ll solve these, energize conduits, and link the various subareas to the central hub so that you can power up a wormhole and jump to the next zone. Once there, you’ll do it all again, coming ever closer to delivering the egg and completing your journey.

Taking Flight

One thing that Compass understands better than a lot of games is that simplicity matters. Flying the ship isn’t about managing systems or memorizing buttons. It’s about instinct, and the sensation of grabbing the yoke with both hands and feeling your body subtly lean into turns.

Compass’ controls are tactile and direct, responsive and forgiving. You plunge the yoke forward to dive, pull it back to climb, and turn left and right to bank. The control sticks allow fine control in all directions, too, though this is muted.

The control scheme works really well. Within minutes of starting the game, I found myself banking my nimble little airship between floating structures in the sky, dipping beneath enormous suspended ruins and swooping left and right in instinctive imitation of leaning a motorcycle into a long curve on an empty road.

You fly through this weird sky, discovering places and ruins and islands of floating stone, strange little huts with even stranger little dudes inhabiting them. You’ll find hostile turrets to be juked, minefields to maneuver through, and other dangers worth avoiding. You’ll be shot and blown up, you’ll repair your ship, you’ll salvage some cargo, and you’ll swoop through marshmallow clouds, always discovering something new just beyond the horizon.

There are many moments of quiet in which all you’re doing is flying through an open sky while distant structures drift by and strange, ambient music hums softly in the background. In short, if you can get yourself into the right frame of mind, it’s a nice place to be.

The Puzzles

If flying is the core pillar of Compass, another is its puzzles. Unlocking these crystal-gated puzzle zones forces you out of the cockpit. The game shifts to environmental traversal sections that involve using your grappling hooks to navigate fragmented ruins, flipping switches, blocking or redirecting beams of energy to reactivate towers and push the caravan onward.

These puzzle areas are generally simple, mechanically, but they serve an important role in adding variety to the game. They increase in complexity the further we get into the game. While they never become truly difficult, like the puzzles in early Zelda games, they make you feel clever.

Turbulence

To say that Compass gets everything right would be a lie. Though flying generally feels engaging and fun, longer play sessions tired me out and I ended up wishing for simpler stick-based flight controls.

Additionally, the game can feel repetitive. Most quests involve tracking down lost objects and returning them to their owners. And most zones feel a bit too similar in both aesthetic and directives. The puzzles are competent without ever being especially memorable. And some players will find the slow exploration tedious (if you didn’t like Wind Waker’s boating, you’re gonna hate this).

And lastly, the world of Compass can feel sparse. The minimalism that makes the world feel mysterious can also leave it feeling underdeveloped. I kept waiting for the game to surprise me with something radically different, a new biome or a deeper narrative turn, or more elaborate puzzles, but these never fully arrived. Compass sort of hints at a larger, stranger universe than the one it ultimately delivers, which is a shame, because what’s here is really, really good. I just wish there was more.

Compass will not be for everyone. Players looking for constant progression, combat, or spectacle may find its gameplay slow and its pacing monotonous. But for the right player, someone willing to accept its rhythm and enjoy the simple act of exploring, it offers a very compelling experience.

Compass Review: Final Verdict

I found myself consistently charmed by Compass. So many modern games are afraid of empty space. They’re built with fear that players will become bored if every moment isn’t packed with stuff; mechanics, voice acting, waypoint markers, yellow paint, the dopamine flood of endless rewards. Compass takes the opposite approach. It trusts that mystery and atmosphere will carry the player through.

Like an old motorcycle, Compass is simple and beautiful. It gives you a cockpit, an open sky, and somewhere cool to fly. For me, that’s more than enough.

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