Submerged: Hidden Depths will be released soon for the console, but the game has been available for PC for some time. We got to test the first hour and here are some thoughts on this, post-apocalyptic indie game.
Our avatar and her brother live in a world that is completely immersed in water. The old, dilapidated houses stand out like islands and we use our old boat to get between the different places. To help us, we have binoculars that we identify the area we are going to, so that it can be seen on the map. Our mission is to return the energy globe to an alien creature, which has taken over the water-filled world.
Submerged: Hidden Depths is super-beautiful to look at; the graphics are clean and stripped down, yet created with an incredible wealth of detail. It’s so easy to make post-disaster games and movies in shades of gray only, but there are lots of colors and shapes to experience here.
The world is populated by various exciting animals, which you catalog after which you find them and everywhere there are human beings, which consist of vegetation and move only when you get close to them. The “plant” animals and humans seem to be inspired by (or rather taken straight off) from the film Annihilation. Something more that is also recognizable is when you return a globe, the black tentacles turn to greenery, which is very reminiscent of the Xbox Game Pass current game The Gunk.
You can not die in the game, you can not even fall from high altitudes. You can only jump if there is an abyss that you can jump over and you never miss. You can climb and swing between different platforms, but this is better done in both Tomb Raider and Uncharted. When there is no threat of death or injury, the feeling of danger and challenge is missing at the same time.
So my summary of the first hour is that Submerged: Hidden Depths is that it is beautiful and nice, but borrows wildly from other movies and games. The choice that the game should