Submerged (2015)

Submerged is a fun little game in a lot of ways similar to games like Journey or Abzu - just on a budget, more repetitive and without the visual flare of the ones mentioned. The game has mixed reviews and rightly so - not everybody will like it.

A disclaimer - I picked up the game with intention to like it and like it I did.

The game takes place in a submerged city with skyscrapers sticking out of the water. You play as a teenage girl, arriving on a boat with a wounded brother. Your brother needs medical supplies, food etc. Luckily on top of some of the buildings lie supply crates that you can collect.

So here’s the game - you jump on a boat, swim around, pick a building to climb and climb it. Once you do, you get a supply crate, a little bit of story is revealed and you repeat the whole process until the game is done.

The story is revealed through little pictograms and as you progress you learn why did you end up here and what happened. You can also collect some book pages which will tell you the story of the city but that’s optional.

Visually it’s a mixed bag. It has some nice looking moments but generally doesn’t look super nice, and mostly gloomy at that. The character movement feels a bit floaty but you do get used to it. The music for the most time is a bit too loud and doesn’t exactly fit in the whole game but it’s there.

If you’re looking for good platforming it’s also not a game for you. The platforming is very basic, the main character will never fall and will stick to any ledges or vines or whatever you need to climb next. If you’re looking for any kind of challenge at all - it’s not this game.

But I did like just how chilled and relaxing the experience was. And when I needed some down time - this was the thing to play. I enjoyed it quite a bit despite all of the above and was happy climbing building for no apparent reason. If you need that - that’s a game for you.

I want to like Submerged. It's a combat-free exploration game, which is often my jam. It's set in an abandoned, partially underwater city, which sounds awesome. Its collectibles unlock pictographic lore, which is a neat idea. And it isn't very long, which should make it the perfect palate cleanser.

But I found a number of issues distracting throughout my playthrough.

The game's visuals make a great first impression. The blues and greens play nicely with the sky and the atmospheric perspective, and the water looks convincing and inviting. But as the day/night cycle shifts and you get closer to the environment and its inhabitants, a lot of seams begin to show:

• Many objects stick out awkwardly at night, as if the textures or lighting wasn't tuned to that time of day. It seemed like the majority of my playthrough was at night, so this really stood out after a while.
• The geometry of objects is very simple, and its textures are low-res and repetitive. If you've played an early 128-bit era game you'll find the "pile of leaves and dirt painted on a bump in the ground" vibe very familiar.
• The water looks nice on its own, but it doesn't interact with objects at all. Sea creatures swim right through waves, buildings and your boat as if they weren't even there.
• The ledges you climb are often placed with no relationship to the building they’re on. Why would there have ever been a ledge going through window panes? It constantly reminds you that this is not a submerged city you're exploring, but a level in a video game.
• Any suspense the cut scenes might have is undercut by the characters' jerky movement, clothing clipping through them, etc.

These issues would be easier to overlook if the gameplay was solid. And while that aspect of the game does fare better, there are still some questionable choices:

• There's really no sense of progression. You are only ever walking or climbing. Sometimes I got the feeling that I was supposed to feel like I was learning something new, but the difference was only cosmetic: You go from climbing vines, to climbing ropes, to climbing ladders, and there is no difficulty increase or unique controls to learn for any of them.
• Even though the game is set up like an open world, you are prevented from collecting the main items outside of a predefined order. But since the object is always the same and the difficulty never increases, it feels arbitrary to wander the world searching for whatever building developers decided would be next in your quest.
• There are a number of optional collectibles, which should be fun, but suffer from a lack of polish. I wanted to document every creature, but some of them would only activate if I ran my boat right into them multiple times. Similarly, you'd come across some massive landmark that only activates if you swim within a yard of it. It's also unclear what constitutes a landmark from a "weird, distinctive building," or why pelicans are creatures but crows are not.

I usually avoid leaving overly critical reviews of games, because I know firsthand how much work goes into them. I bought this game on sale and finished it, so I worry I'm being overly harsh. I was just so oddly fascinated by what a mixed bag this is, that I felt compelled to share those thoughts.

After the first hour of playing this game, I wasn't sure I wanted to continue. It's rather pretty on the whole, but the textures are bland, the movement animation of the player character is the stiffest I've seen in many years, and the movement of the boat seems unnatural. Also, the only real action in the game--climbing buildings, à la Ubisoft towers--is not at all challenging or even clever for the most part. (To be fair, it isn't challenging in Ubisoft games, either; but those games offer other challenges, which this game does not.)

But then I found myself coming back the next day to play some more. In part this was because of the interesting way the story unfolds via pictograms. There are two stories, one about the main characters, a brother and sister (you play the sister), and the other about how the world came to be "submerged." The city story is the longer of the two and I found it a bit hard to parse, but I appreciated the unique way the story was told was told. The pictograms are unlocked by finding collectibles, which gives you a reason to explore the world beyond finding the ten supply crates needed to nurse your injured little brother back to health, which is the primary motivation of the game.

I was also struck by the natural beauty. Though the boat handles rather awkwardly, there are impressive moments as you zip along and a pod of dolphins comes to swim alongside your boat, or a ray soars over your head, or a giant whale breaches the water in front of you, backlit by a lovely sunset. There is no combat and you can't die. The game is just a charming palate cleanser, which is exactly what I needed after almost 45 brutal hours of Mafia 3.