Burly Men at Sea is an odd sort of game, with it's simple art style, repetitive music, simple story threads, and child friendly tone, it feels less like a game and more like a bedtime story that gets read to a child every night to help them fall asleep. Things get even less complicated when talking about the gameplay, you have move left, move right, and interact. Things never get more complicated than that. Each playthrough takes about 20 minutes give or take and while that sounds ridiculous what BMAS does have is it's unique story branches. It's not ridiculously expansive but every choice you make in the game leads you down a completely different narrative path, which is pretty dang ambitious for a game of this caliber.

While I wouldn't call any of the narrative paths engrossing there's a certain childish charm to them that I found myself wanting to stay in (enough so to 100% the game). The only downside to it is that once a narrative path has been exhausted there really isn't any reason to return to it (aside from if you'd just like to play it again?).

I can see this being a great game for parents to play with really young children and it's admirable that a game essentially for toddlers can still manage to be enjoyable for an older audience. While I don't see myself returning to it anytime soon, Burly Men at Sea has enough charm and uniqueness for me to recommend it.