Well this is so far the biggest and most impressive mod I've played in terms of content available to the player. I do have some things to say about my experience though.

The water dash is wildly overpowered. It's good for getting around the staggeringly huge environments, but that's the thing, it's better for travel. Places like Crystal Lake or the Ice Lava Cake found within the Cursed Ice Globe should not have water dashing enabled. It allows for bypassing HUGE portions of platforming. If the angle is that you want players to get creative with the water dash by allowing them to take absolutely insane shortcuts with extreme ease, then I'd say you're going overboard with that notion, resulting in bad level design. Specifically WASTED level design because of just how much and how easily it all can be skipped.

The Crystal Lake for example has moving red flowers and poison plant seed hooks. All of these, literally every single one can be very very easily skipped with a simple jump+water dash followed by a double jump, and a dive-and-cancel for good measure if needed. This area was clearly intended to have multiple A Hat In Time platforming elements used to traverse it, but the water dash is just so incredulously superior and useful for traveling, that it actually results in these areas being more boring than they should be given what is laid out in front of the player.

Water dashing makes platforming easy, which therefore makes platforming less engaging to the player because it's demanding way way waaaaaay less of the player in order to accomplish a goal/reach the end.
Water dashing for platforming should not be allowed unless the environment/challenge was built with water dashing in mind, such as the upper platforming sections above the fish market. These can be done without water dashing, but it's satisfying and much more helpful to utilize it when higher up. Water dashing is excellent for small shortcuts that raise the risk of falling a bit more in exchange for a faster climb, or if the area is something that will be climbed numerous times, which the upper canopy and tree house portions above the fish market absolutely are.
Even better examples of water dashing incorporated properly would be Stroll In The Clouds and Old Tower. Both of these were beautiful, nerve-wracking, and designed to require water dashing or they cannot be completed. It was fun and tense, as a challenge utilizing such an overpowered move should always be.

I strongly recommend incorporating some sort of excuse into the game to disable water dashing anywhere in the Cursed Ice Globe that is not the main central city, and likely a few other places as well. I recall a time rift accessed I think from the fish market in one of the houses or perhaps under the underwater river bridge (called Messy Blocks or something) which allowed me to use my water powers, and was boring because of how incredibly easy it was. Just 8 or 9 water dash jumps and I was done, with loads and loads of room to fail said water dash and recover.

When I first entered the Cursed Ice Globe, I wandered around the outer areas of the main city looking for something to do. I didn't realize the city was powered down and dark, because plenty of things were still glowing blue and pink. I wandered aimlessly for perhaps 3 to 5 minutes before finally realizing the center-piece was the only area I hadn't checked, and was glowing a different color than everything else.

The level design should be modified to prevent players like me who start with the least interesting routes (as a force of habit to try and not miss anything while exploring) from being misguided so easily. Making everything legitimately dark instead of just glowing pink and mostly blue, or having a distinct, noticeable cobblestone/icestone road the player enters on that leads straight to the center would do wonders.

There was also a hide-and-seek character in the fish market that, for the life of me, I was unable to find the second hiding spot for. His hint is "small forest" and he says the game takes place in "this town". The only "small forest" I could think of that was attached to the fish market town was the small grassy area to the side with the tree houses up above it. He was nowhere on the ground, and I didn't see him anywhere as I climbed all the way to the top either. Is the "town" literally anywhere with wooden houses, and not just the fish market? So the entirety of the Breathing Sea area? Does that mean he was referring to Purple Ember Forest? Nevertheless, I was unable to find him and gave up after around 20 minutes of confusion and frustration. That is one of the few time pieces I did not actually get as a result.

There's a few things that need to be worded more clearly or physically laid out in the environment better in order to guide the player to where the player doesn't realize they want to be.

I'm not sure if I just never actually managed to find a special terminal or object in the fish market that tells me how many water tears I've collected, as Valdro's computer doesn't do this, but if I'm correct and there isn't actually a way... then it would be extremely helpful if players could check how many they had, and thus gauge how many they needed left before they could upgrade their water powers again.

Now, I'm not one to wrinkle my nose at a good meme. I actually chuckled aloud when I knocked the Mafia thug off of Old Tower and heard a bass-boosted Roblox "Oof!". I also really liked the Sans reference from the pig in the fish market. However, The Breathing Sea really lays it on far too thick for my tastes in other areas. Most especially, character dialogue. Characters are sometimes cringy and obnoxious in how their dialogue is written, while others just come off as bland. A good example of this is the old man in the shack that rambles about several different personal stories. You can make a character running with that schtick without turning into an irritating middle-schooler. Him ending his sentences with "CAN U BELEIVE IT!!!!!!11" and overall seeming like it was typed up by a child who still thinks typing like English is your second language is still funny is not actually funny. It just comes off as near-sighted and gets old very fast.

Not just characters having "LEL EPIC MEMEZ H4X0R DIALOGUE BRUH!!!!69" to the point it makes the player groan in agitation, but there's also a problem of some characters having inconsistent tones.
The Scientist Penguin for instance has a very qwerky, crazed, ego-bloated personality from how he is written, and it's obvious he is written to try and get the player to smirk with his dialogue even though he comes up short in this regard. While he isn't nearly as badly and childishly written as other characters, when you read his journal found in his library, it tells a much more serious tale, and tries its very darnedest to give The Scientist an emotional backstory for some reason. It clearly wants to make the player feel bad for and take seriously the woes of a character that was just shouting "I am the best scientist ever! My phone has all kinds of gameplay-convenient gadgets!" at them previously.
Stick with a tone for a character. The reason this worked for The Snatcher in A Hat In Time's base game for Subcon Forest is because his backstory was shown in pictures, not a journal entry. Pictures tell a third-person-narrated story. Journal entries tell a first-person-narrated story. The Scientist is telling us about himself, rather than some thought-provoking pictures that tell a brief "Awww" sort of story from a neutral and distanced perspective. Journal entries from a character count as part of that character's personality, where's pictures don't, thus the base game can get away with (and even benefit from in the same way the Journal exposition was aiming for) changing the tone of how the player looks at a character.

If you ask me, the vast majority of all dialogue needs to be rewritten. Drop the stupid "OMG EPIC LOLMEMES!!111!!!69! :D :D" aspect of the dialogue. Stop using text-emoticons entirely. Let the words/model express the character instead.
As an easter egg, it's fine. As the primary way of speaking for one or more characters, it comes off as effortless, low-hanging fruit pretending to be clever or hilarious when it's not. Give characters actual personalities independent of internet memes with every single line they speak. You can still accomplish exactly what you want each character to do and to be without stooping to such a kiddy approach to dialogue and humor.

I am pretty sure this is a design choice and not a bug so I'm posting it in my feedback and not in my bugs list reply that I made.
The player cannot take damage, like at all, in the main Breathing Sea area with the Purple Ember Forest and fish market.
Fall damage doesn't hurt you. You flash red and a damage sound plays but your health doesn't go down. The void crows at the evil red temple attack you, but your health still doesn't go down. Nothing is able to harm you.
This isn't restricted to this area either. There are several areas elsewhere in the game where you don't take damage for failing a platforming challenge. Most (if not all) Time Rifts don't take a life point away if you fall and have to be warped back to a checkpoint. Neither does the Crystal Lake if you fall in.

Now, granted, for some time rifts, like the Ominous Depths one reached after jumping into the sea floor sink hole, I'm actually glad falling didn't take any life points, because I fell a lot. A few places were because Hat Kid refused to run up the wall and grab a ledge when she should have, and other places I simply fell because I didn't yet realize exactly what was being asked of me. I fell perhaps around 10 times in that challenge, though I still think it should have punished me for the failure, but simply had generous and well-placed checkpoints. I enjoy a challenge and I enjoy doing it wrong if I know what to do, because it feels like my fault. Falling because I do not yet understand what to do can be chalked up to poor level design and platform/camera positions established by the level.

When you combine so many different challenges having no penalty for failing with the fact that water dashing is so ridiculously valuable for skipping over huge portions of platforming sections, it results in a very disconnected player experience. You don't care if you fall, it's just a very small setback. You don't care to swing on hooks or ride moving platforms because you can mega-launch yourself to the end much much much faster with the press of 3 buttons that require no skill to perform after you understand how to do them (which the water dashing tutorial lays out quite clearly).

When first finding the seabed sinkhole, as well as reading The Scientist's journal, I was filled with a sense of anticipation and wonder, because I thought for sure that a mod which rested so heavily on oceanic aspects for its core theme would incorporate a sea monster.

I thought The Scientist was referring to the day his island was attacked by a huge beast, and all he could see was the eye as it rose up.

I thought the seabed sinkhole led to a grand underwater environment equal in size to the main Breathing Sea area, and would lead to some really creative mission about awakening a Leviathan creature.

When I looked out to the distant islands like Cursed Ice Globe or Purple Ember Forest or Old Tower, the scale of my surroundings was very enticing, and the whole area was begging for a "stormy" variation, akin to Mafia Town from the base vanilla game having a mission where it was raining heavily to match the theme of the 'alien' aspect as it introduced you to the mud covering mechanic.
I thought for sure there would be a point where I returned to the hub fish market and there would be a terrible storm and something in the water way in the distance that I had to go and confront, playing heavily on everybody's natural sense of thalassophobia (general fear of open water) and the mod being the size that it was would have a really incredible, huge arena-incorporating underwater boss fight where the water powers really got to shine their brightest.

Unfortunately, this never happened and I was quite let down, though I understand, as what I envisioned would be enormous amounts of very arduous work on top of a hefty slew of enjoyable content I'd already played through so far.
Still though, while playing, I never knew what would be thrown at me next. Joffrey's Castle had rather low-quality and disgusting looking models, but then the interiors of the Cursed Ice Globe were amazing and (unless I'm mistaken) the hide-and-seek character at the fish market and cactus hugger character at Joffrey's Castle were unique models of very high and well-animated quality. This lead me to believe just about anything could be waiting for me, be it amateur-looking silliness or passionately created and carefully coded works of art. One might call this a lack of consistency in art direction, and they'd be absolutely correct. However, for me, it ended up keeping me on my toes of what I would find next more than it bothered me with the wild fluxuations in quality/detail/fine-tuning.

There's lots of room for really neat and exciting and engaging things to be added to The Breathing Sea. Some of them screaming to be added, like a sea monster, others, just an earnest murmur of improvement.


Overall the mod is absolutely incredible. I loved the concepts, (though not how all of them were implemented), the aesthetics were fantastic, my performance was always good to tolerable and only seemed to slow a bit later into the mod, not sure why. The new mechanics introduced were given a good workout, and had actual skill-climbs for the player to embark on and get genuinely better at the more they played, giving a constant sense of progression, even in something as simple as traveling long distances to get to another island, as there are less and more efficient ways to travel as you continue, and as you unlock more water powers.

The amount of time pieces and diverse challenges and creative themes for different areas was a very refreshing experience. I genuinely did not expect the mod to be as big as it was to the point it could provide me with multiple hours of gameplay time I didn't regret.

If The Breathing Sea was given lots of love, attention, and revision based on playtesting and feedback and carefully-thought-out design choices, it could legitimately put shame to the Seal The Deal DLC for the base game. It's already on the road to being something special, and has a very real shot at being a top-5 most community-beloved A Hat In Time mod, but it's clearly in its infancy as far as what it can eventually be.

0/10 being trash that should be deleted from the workshop.
10/10 being a masterpiece that matches or surpasses the quality and enjoyability of the full base game.
I'd give The Breathing Sea a 7/10. Needs lots and lots of work, love, and care to keep it going to where it could be in just a couple years time!