This review contains spoilers
This game is rad, it's a master of "tell don't show". First of all, I love the unique framing. Seeing everything through the lens of a navigation system gives the game a strong identity. I enjoyed the slow rhythm of exploration, reading and movement. It can be a bit tedious but overall it creates a cool vibe.
It's really cool that you're not directly seeing everything, you just have your sonar screen {which looks incredible and still manages to show you beautiful environments} and a whole ocean of text to read from the main character's observations. This game is mostly reading, but the game around that adds a lot to the experience. The minimalist style and constant brief prose descriptions of the environment go very well together
The ecosystems you explore are fascinating, I especially enjoyed how symbiotic relationships are so fundamental to each one. I loved learning about all the different species and I love the scientific writing. The main character makes observations, speculations and discoveries ... it gives a lot more flavor to these text entries. You're not just reading encyclopedia entries, you're going along with the journey of cataloguing stuff for the first time.
The only thing that really brings down this game for me is that it decided to go in the direction of "humans ruin everything, the evil company ruined the planet". This is a really tired sci-fi troupe. Saying that humans have the capacity to do this isn't really saying anything interesting...I know already. I'd have much prefered if this stayed as a first contact story. I think the exploration gets a lot less interesting when you're exploring the wrecks of human structures... exploring ecosystems is way more interesting. {The ratis colony rules though}. I loved the concept of the artificers, again I think it would have been a more interesting story to actually be making first contact with them instead of discovering that they're almost all dead.
I guess a good way to say it is that I'd rather In Other Waters focused entirely on the beauty and strangeness of the planet and relationships the main character has. I liked the story much more when it was on a personal scope concerning minae, shame how that's dropped for the "something bigger going on in this planet".
Also the gameplay is a bit underutilized. The resource management is fine, it's succesful in it's purpose but not much else. There's some cool potential with dropping samples into the environment. I'd love to play a game where the ecosystems are more complex and you have to puzzle out how to interact with it.
Some of the navigation for sample requests can be a bit frustrating. You have a pretty basic map and it's easy to miss nodes that you didn't choose to follow on your first time through. It's hard to visualize how to get somewhere just from looking at it's location on the dive map. In the bloom specifically, I had to go through the area for a long time, reexploring over and over again before I finally got all the samples there. {Fun fact: if you try to explore the bloom after getting the blowtorch, then Ellery will literally prevent you from exploring to the point that you'd stumble onto site 2 before you find the breached city in the depths. }
Finally I'd say the biggest missed potential is the relationship you have with the main character. They should have explored more of the interesting things about living symbiotically, which in turn fits thematically with the world you're exploring. I think if the game had gone all in on this direction it could easily have been a masterpiece for me.
It's really cool that you're not directly seeing everything, you just have your sonar screen {which looks incredible and still manages to show you beautiful environments} and a whole ocean of text to read from the main character's observations. This game is mostly reading, but the game around that adds a lot to the experience. The minimalist style and constant brief prose descriptions of the environment go very well together
The ecosystems you explore are fascinating, I especially enjoyed how symbiotic relationships are so fundamental to each one. I loved learning about all the different species and I love the scientific writing. The main character makes observations, speculations and discoveries ... it gives a lot more flavor to these text entries. You're not just reading encyclopedia entries, you're going along with the journey of cataloguing stuff for the first time.
The only thing that really brings down this game for me is that it decided to go in the direction of "humans ruin everything, the evil company ruined the planet". This is a really tired sci-fi troupe. Saying that humans have the capacity to do this isn't really saying anything interesting...I know already. I'd have much prefered if this stayed as a first contact story. I think the exploration gets a lot less interesting when you're exploring the wrecks of human structures... exploring ecosystems is way more interesting. {The ratis colony rules though}. I loved the concept of the artificers, again I think it would have been a more interesting story to actually be making first contact with them instead of discovering that they're almost all dead.
I guess a good way to say it is that I'd rather In Other Waters focused entirely on the beauty and strangeness of the planet and relationships the main character has. I liked the story much more when it was on a personal scope concerning minae, shame how that's dropped for the "something bigger going on in this planet".
Also the gameplay is a bit underutilized. The resource management is fine, it's succesful in it's purpose but not much else. There's some cool potential with dropping samples into the environment. I'd love to play a game where the ecosystems are more complex and you have to puzzle out how to interact with it.
Some of the navigation for sample requests can be a bit frustrating. You have a pretty basic map and it's easy to miss nodes that you didn't choose to follow on your first time through. It's hard to visualize how to get somewhere just from looking at it's location on the dive map. In the bloom specifically, I had to go through the area for a long time, reexploring over and over again before I finally got all the samples there. {Fun fact: if you try to explore the bloom after getting the blowtorch, then Ellery will literally prevent you from exploring to the point that you'd stumble onto site 2 before you find the breached city in the depths. }
Finally I'd say the biggest missed potential is the relationship you have with the main character. They should have explored more of the interesting things about living symbiotically, which in turn fits thematically with the world you're exploring. I think if the game had gone all in on this direction it could easily have been a masterpiece for me.