Baldo
Image: Naps Team

Baldo: The Guardian Owls — a gorgeous-looking Ghibli-inpired RPG from Naps Team — has been on our radar for a couple of years now, and it's been quite some time since it got highlighted in the March 2020 Nintendo Indie World Showcase.

Originally scheduled to launch last summer, its revised 27th August 2021 release date came and went last week and eagle-eyed readers will have noted a lack of review on the site. In fact, if you've been following the game's progress you may have noticed a lack of reviews across the board — at the time of writing Metacritic pages for the game on every platform are bereft of critical opinion.

Being a much-anticipated game, we reached out to Italian developers Naps Team earlier in the month to ask if pre-launch review code would be available. As a small team self-publishing a game across multiple platforms, it's not unusual for things to go up to the wire, but code wasn't forthcoming and we ended up purchasing the game when it released last Friday. We have been working on the review since then.

In the course of our playthrough so far, we have encountered some progress-breaking issues and bugs. We were eventually able to get past a glitching doorway (thanks, reddit), but it's far from smooth sailing with the current build.

Naps Team has been on Twitter and Facebook discussing a patch available soon that will presumably address these issues:

As you can see, a patch dropped on Xbox yesterday and we're hoping the first Switch update (one of several hotfixes to come) will follow soon.

In light of the fact that our progress is stalled and updates are imminent, we'll be delaying publication of our Baldo review until we've been able to test the new version of the game and finish it. We can't put an exact time frame on when you can expect the review, but rest assured we're working on it.

Let us know if you've been playing Baldo and how you're finding it so far with a comment below.