A mute owl who cannot fly, a sky full of islands, and a decade of pixel-art charm.
Owlboy is the hand-drawn metroidvania from Norwegian studio D-Pad Studio, released for PC in October 2016 and expanded to PlayStation, Xbox and Nintendo Switch over the following year. You play Otus, a mute owl who cannot fly until his mentor Asio gives him his wings, and you cross a world whose landmasses were lifted into the sky by an ancient device. D-Pad Studio shipped a substantial 10th anniversary update on November 1, 2026 - the first major feature patch in eight years - adding auto-aim, keyboard support, Super Dash, cutscene skipping and a rebalanced combat pass. This wiki covers the story, the characters, the sky regions, every enemy and boss, the collectibles and the anniversary patch.
Every sprite, background and animation was drawn by hand, with looping animation frames that give the world a constant, gentle motion. It is the reason people still replay a ten-year-old indie game.
Otus never speaks. The story is carried entirely by animation, item pickups and a score that does most of the emotional work.
Otus cannot use weapons. Geddy, Alphonse, Twig and the others do the fighting while you solve the platforming. You swap who is on your back as much as you swap your route.
Clouds can be ridden, rained on and thrown into suction vents. The world is a set of floating landmasses, and manipulating the ones in the sky is how you open the ones on the ground.
Owlboy is a hand-drawn metroidvania from D-Pad Studio, a small Norwegian team that spent roughly nine years making it before releasing it for PC in October 2016. PlayStation, Xbox and Nintendo Switch versions followed through early 2017. It carries a Metascore of 88 and holds a "Very Positive" Steam rating at roughly 84% across around 6,100 reviews.
The premise is unusual for the genre. The world of Owlboy is a World in the Sky - a planet whose landmasses were lifted off the ocean floor by an ancient device called the Anti-Hex, leaving an empty sea below. The islands are grouped into regions, and the whole map is a chain of floating chunks that you unlock as you go.
You play Otus, a mute, clumsy owl who lives in the floating settlement of Vellie and cannot fly. His mentor Asio gives him the owl cloak - his wings - which is the literal unlock for the game's central mechanic. From there the story is about sky pirates, three ancient Owl relics and one of your own kind working against you.
The game's most distinctive structural choice is that Otus never uses a weapon himself. He carries companions - Geddy, Alphonse, Twig, Anne and others - on his back, and they shoot while he platforming. You are constantly deciding who to carry and who to leave behind, and different companions solve different problems. This is why the game feels longer and stranger than its roughly ten-hour runtime suggests.
On November 1, 2026 - ten years on - D-Pad Studio shipped the first substantial feature patch for Owlboy since 2022, and the largest update the game has ever had. It landed on Steam, GOG and Humble simultaneously.
The anniversary was also marked with a livestream - a Q&A with Simon and Jo-Remi of D-Pad Studio, plus a first public demo of the scrapped co-op mode, and an Otus plushie raffle. After the update shipped, the studio said it was returning to its other project, Vikings On Trampolines. The 10th anniversary update and a Steam sale at 75% off made late October 2026 the busiest Owlboy has been in years, which is why the search volume for the game spiked right around November 2, 2026.