My exploration of Apple Arcade continues with this exploration of the wonders of the ocean.
This is the latest in a minor trend of video games letting you experience the mysteries of the undersea world as a human diver. I’d rather be a dolphin or mermaid, but hey. This way perhaps lets the game engage the player more directly with a story of human discovery and, in this case, push real-world educational and activism goals.
The developer E-Line Media worked with real-life ocean scientists, educators, and the BBC itself (building off their Blue Planet II documentary) to make the game authentic in illustrating to the player behaviours of ocean life, and the way humanity interacts with them (conservation, research, exploitation). Like Jupiter & Mars, they’re trying to connect you with this vast ecosystem and our impacts on it through the game events as well as with supplementary videos.
As far as that goes, it’s relatively successful. Your diver character Mirai has a personal connection to sperm whales, while other members of the team (who communicate to you through voiceover and between-dive conversation cutscenes) have their own goals on the expedition. Your dives introduce you to different sea life with an emphasis on cetaceans for the important plot encounters, as well as issues that face them such as sonic trauma from mining, or toxicity of algal blooms.
The near-future setting lets them incorporate advanced technology into the gameplay so as to ignore some practicality issues: you don’t ever have to worry about air, or getting attacked. In fact if I had to classify the game it’s closer to a walking simulator than anything else: there’s no real peril or much in the way of gameplay mechanics beyond swimming around, pointing a cursor as a sonic telescope, and scanning critters. Which is fine! As a peaceful experience that’s also narrative-driven, it works.
The game strives for a realistic look and it’s pretty good on the eye, albeit with a quite low draw distance. Some levels are also very dark or have a visual filter of debris. You still feel the majesty of the remarkable creatures you encounter, but also sometimes a fish will swim straight through a rock wall, and the more you play the smaller the maps feel as you traverse them. There’s also very limited interaction between creatures aside from a few scattered scripted events. So things can begin to feel game-y and shallow if you spend too much time with it.
In that sense it’s good that it’s over quickly, or to put it another way it’s quite short and I’m glad it was included in my Apple Arcade subscription, in my case. The frequent character voicework is surprisingly good (although the subtitle text has the odd typo), not annoying and adds a sense of realism and humanity to the proceedings. The touted “player choice” mechanics are in my opinion overstated; the few dialogue options didn’t seem to impact the story much at all, and in fact one choice I made seemed to have been reversed by the game in the following cutscenes? But just following this low-stakes story is enough, and as a kind of playable nature documentary with some added human drama it’s quite endearing.