A small perfect game—now lost beneath the dark waves of time. Obscure, nearly unknown, nearly unmentioned, and, in some ways, aplots unmatched in the genre.

This has as much clarity of artistic vision as any game of similar scale I’ve played. And the overlapping systems governing traversal and survival create an interesting set of looming risks and vital rewards. It all makes for a very deliberate type of play. The sheer movement embodies more interesting trade-offs than basic movement almost ever does. You can slowly walk along the ocean floor. You can jump in a low arc. You can grip and climb walls (with its own stamina meter.) And you can amplify your ability to move around the environment by using oxygen like at jet pack. This comes at the cost of using oxygen more rapidly than you would otherwise. Oxygen, it turns out, is pretty vital to your survival. And using the compressed oxygen to jet around makes travel faster and even allows you to reach places you couldn’t otherwise, but it comes with the additional risk that you’ll go too fast and land too hard—cracking or destroying one of your precious oxygen tanks. There is also a pressure gauge which keeps track of your current depth. This is critical because the suit you wear specifies a maximum depth beyond which you can barely survive for any amount of time. Too much time below the max depth line and your suit cracks and all oxygen is lost. So dive here but no further (or if you have to descend below then be quick about it at least.) All these trade-offs provides a sense of freedom and choice within some very significant and thematically coherent constraints. And beyond all those intricately interlocking mechanics, the subtly mysterious— almost wordless —world which the designers have lovingly crafted is pure magic.

Always thinking about taking another dive.