Narcosis (2017)

Narcosis is a lovely little game where you progress slowly along the seafloor, your titanium diving suit casting only the weakest of glows over your surroundings. An earthquake has destroyed the underwater facility where you worked as an engineer, so you must search for survivors and a means of escape. You find your co-worker’s corpses – each one posed to suggest how they expired. Meanwhile you are running out of oxygen and suffer from hallucinations that make it difficult to get your bearings.

Narcosis is basically a ‘walking simulator’ with some light puzzle solving and even lighter combat elements. It is a little clunky, not particularly scary, but it worked for me due to the pervading sense of isolation that its location breeds. I thought the hallucinations felt hackneyed and tacked on, betraying a lack of confidence in the game’s grounded setting. This is unfortunate because there really are some chilling moments – tossing a flare in a dark cave to reveal an enormous spidercrab that was uncomfortably close sent me thrusting in reverse.

The narrative is well presented. There is a voiceover that frames the story as an interview with the sole survivor of the event, which I thought was compelling and well-acted. It is slow-paced and very short, but I still enjoyed my time with it, probably because I had no expectations for it at all.

NARCOSIS HAS BEEN RELEASED! (and unfortunately it looks like garbage).

I've been waiting for this deep sea survival horror game for ages and it looked really promising. All of the promotional material was extremely vague and it gave just little teasers and blurry screenshots. But now that the game is out, the true "horror" has been revealed.

The trailer on the Steam page pretty much says it all. You walk around a deep sea wreckage (in a diving suit) and spooky ghosts of drowned people flash in and out of existence giving you jumpscares. It feels like a meme at this point, in horror games where the narrative is told by translucent humans, the tortured souls of the dead who appear, give you a fright, but then dispense a little audio snippet of the plot.

The game's description says it all: "No shadowy organisations or eldritch terrors at Narcosis’ dark heart, only primal fears and human limits." That doesn't sound like a good thing to put in your game's description. It's basically admitting that your game doesn't have a plot, and that the devs didn't create any character models for monsters/creatures. I wonder if this was an intentional design decision or if it was corner-cutting. I mean, it's much easier to add in a bunch of dome-headed ghostly diving suits than to create and animate "eldritch terrors."

The final death rattle of the game comes in two more things I noticed. Firstly, reviews are saying it's only around 2.5 or 3 hours in length, without much replay value. So $20 seems a bit steep. Also the full implementation of VR (I don't remember that feature being promoted until now). It seems like recently some devs have been shoehorning in VR at the last minute to add some value to their game. Maybe that's what justifies the $20 price tag?

In conclusion I haven't played this game and I don't plan to, so I won't be giving it a rating (edit: apparently I have to give it a rating). But for anyone interested in a good deep sea horror experience, go and play Soma because it's a horror masterpiece.

Footnote: If Narcosis gets a bunch of positive reviews then I'll actually play it myself and will amend this review if necessary. But to me it seems like the writing is on the wall.