3/5 ★ – pinksteady's review of Submerged.

For some reason this game ended up on my sale-tracker wish-list a while ago, and it popped up for £5.80 a few weeks ago and so it felt rude not to. It is an environmental exploration game at heart - it takes place in the distant future when everything other than the tallest buildings are underwater, and you are the sister of an ill/wounded brother who is tasked with scaling a number of these buildings to find rations and supplies to heal him. The gameplay consists of using your telescope to find rations at the top of buildings, and then sailing to and climbing up those buildings. Once collected, you are then auto-travelled back to your brother, who gets. A bit better, then you set out to find the next building. And repeat. That’s about it in terms of gameplay. Mechanics-wise, you are either in a boat or climbing buildings, and the physics of both are pretty average. The handling of the boat you spend a lot of time in is unrealistic and just silly, and the climbing is boring, repetitive and unremarkable. The way you traverse from ledge to ledge is animated so stiffly, that combined with the lack of variety of the climbing scenarios the whole thing just felt really mechanical. Graphically, the game was both pretty and uninspiring at the same time. It yielding some nice sunsets and hues, with some cool large-scale things like whales and skyscrapers (I have a weak spot for large-scale stuff in games) but generally the graphics look like they came from a Half-Life 1-era game and engine. For a game released 2 years ago, it looked more dated than it should. Now I’m probably spoilt by the high-quality big-budget games I’ve played recently, but I am a fan of small-team indie games and generally am favourable to them if they have something deeper to offer, but Submerged failed to demonstrate such a reason for its existence. There was nothing particularly thought or emotion provoking, and I struggled to understand what exactly the developers were trying to convey, or what story they were really trying to tell. It felt like I was playing the tech demo of a junior developer who was learning the ropes of building a game, and had put the thinnest of stories on top of their new engine to show it off. (Ok I’m being snarky - it must have taken ages to design all the buildings etc - this wasn’t a game created on a whim). I feel bad writing this - I don’t enjoy writing generally-negative reviews of games that clearly real people have put a lot of time and effort into, and so I don’t mean to discredit that. It isn’t a flop, but it just didn’t manage to appeal to me, personally. From checking online, it seems plenty of people enjoyed it, which is great.