Uncharted Waters: New Horizons

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An Introduction To Today’s Game

Before Assassin's Creed let players climb rooftops across the Mediterranean, Koei put them behind the wheel of an entire fleet.

Uncharted Waters: New Horizons arrived on the Super Nintendo in 1994, dropping players into the Age of Discovery with six different captains to choose from, each chasing a different fortune across a world map built for wandering.

There is no single hero here. You can play a Portuguese noble, a Spanish pirate, a British privateer, or one of three other hopefuls, then decide whether trade, piracy, or exploration suits you best.

It is patient, ambitious, and more than a little demanding of your time. Let's chart a course through what made it work, and whether it still holds up.

BEHIND THE PIXELS

Let’s Dive Into The Game

Picture a strategy RPG that traded dungeons for the open ocean.

Uncharted Waters: New Horizons is part role playing game, part trading simulation, part naval combat, and it never quite settles into being just one of those things.

You choose one of six protagonists, each with a distinct backstory and goal, then sail off to build a reputation across trade, piracy, or adventure.

The core loop revolves around your ship and your crew. You buy goods cheap in one port and sell them for more somewhere else, hire sailors and gunners, and decide how much risk you are willing to take on open water.

Storms, pirates, and rival navies can all end a voyage early, and losing a ship sets you back hours of progress.

Exploration carries its own reward system, separate from combat or trade. This is where the game shined for me.

Landing on unfamiliar coastlines lets you search native villages for discoveries, anything from exotic animals to geographic landmarks, which you can then sell to cartographer guilds for a solid profit. Progress here rewards patience and timing far more than reflexes.

You could call this an early open world game. The exploration is truly fun and engaging. It’s still exciting to play and finding out what’s just a little further ahead.

The difficulty leans toward endurance rather than skill. Advancing a character's story usually comes down to sticking with long voyages and slowly raising fame in whichever category matches their goals, which can make early hours feel slow before the systems click into place. It is a game built for players willing to sit with one save file for dozens of hours.

Visually, it holds up better than plenty of its SNES contemporaries, with a detailed world map and enough port city variety to keep exploration interesting, though character movement in town can look stiff by modern standards.

Yoko Kanno, who also scored the original Uncharted Waters, returns here, giving the whole voyage a fittingly grand and orchestral backdrop that still sounds great today.

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GAME INFORMATION

WHERE TO PLAY

• Nintendo Switch Online - SNES app.

• Original Copies of the Game (All prices in USD)

  • Loose: $86

  • Complete: $190

  • New/Sealed: $620

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GAME OVER

Why You Should Play This

So is Uncharted Waters: New Horizons worth booting up today? If you have ever wanted an SNES game that trusts you to set your own goals, this is one of the few that actually delivers on it. Six different playthroughs, three separate fame paths, and a genuinely huge map mean there is a real reason to come back after one captain's story wraps up.

It does ask for more patience than most modern games, and the menu-driven interface will feel unfamiliar if you are used to something more streamlined. But thanks to Nintendo Switch Online adding it to the SNES library back in 2025, there has never been an easier legal way to try it without hunting down an aging cartridge going for hundreds.

Give it a few hours before deciding it is too much game. The early grind gives way to a surprisingly open world once you find your sea legs, and there are not many other games from 1994 offering six entirely different lives to live at sea.

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RETRO HARDWARE

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