Owlboy's moment-to-moment verbs are simple, but they interact in ways that take a few hours to internalise.
The owl cloak gives you sustained flight and gliding, and it is the difference between a room you can solve and a room you cannot. Gliding lets you cross gaps that running cannot, and flying upward is how most vertical shafts are opened. Because the game is a metroidvania, the map is layered: coming back with the cloak - or a new companion - routinely unlocks the room you walked past two hours ago.
Otus cannot use weapons. He carries a gunner on his back, and that companion shoots automatically while you move. Press R to recall a companion that has been dropped, and throw the one you are carrying to stun enemies or to hit switches from a distance. Throwing Alphonse into a group of Gawks to stun the whole pack, as the 10th anniversary update explicitly calls out, is a legitimate tactic rather than a curiosity.
| Colour | Effect |
|---|---|
| Green | Healing |
| Yellow | Speed |
| Blue | Defence |
| Red | Attack |
| Orange | Fire rate |
They are consumables rather than permanent upgrades, so the correct play is to spend them in a fight rather than hoard them. Health fruit healing was one of the values rebalanced in the anniversary update, so if your early game felt too generous or too harsh, that is why.
Poison jars plus water produce a toxic sludge. That sludge petrifies enemies and opens carnivorous plants, which turns a hazard into a tool. Several puzzle rooms are built around deliberately creating a pool of sludge and using it on the right target.
Clouds can be ridden with the right mouse button, rained on with the left mouse button, and thrown into suction vents to plug them. Corks can also be used to plug vents. Because the world floats in the sky, the level design uses these objects constantly - a cloud is sometimes a platform, sometimes a weapon and sometimes the missing piece of a machine.
Save points in Owlboy are a "gentleman fish" - a fish in a top hat, standing upright, waiting patiently. They were replaced by autosaves in the final release. They are still a good mental model for where you can safely experiment.
Auto-aim for companion shots and thrown items, Super Dash on a held roll button, keyboard and touchpad control schemes, full remapping, separate screen-shake and flashing-light toggles, cutscene skipping for major scenes and most boss intros, and removal of hidden off-screen enemies. If you bounced off the game before because of the two-thumbstick requirement or the long unskippable cutscenes, the 10th anniversary update is aimed squarely at you.