Shinsekai: Into The Depths iOS
Developer/publisher Capcom Format iOS Release Out now
Nintendo could have its work cut out with the next Metroid if other developers continue to refine its formula so well. Capcom’s undersea action-adventure is yet another case in point. It borrows the structure of Metroid II: Return Of Samus (and its underwhelming 3DS remake), although here it’s water pressure gating your descent beneath a frozen planet. It captures that feeling of splendid isolation of the best Metroids, too, its beautiful setting inspiring a kind of trepidatious awe. But it has enough ideas of its own – alongside a few pinched from elsewhere – to feel distinctive, and not just because it’s a mobile game that feels, in the best way, like a high-quality console release.
Its premium feel is soon apparent: unlike a few Apple Arcade games, this does not feel like it’s been rushed out by any means. Indeed, the game itself is in no hurry. Though the early pacing is excellent, with a string of discoveries and new kit encouraging you onward, your lonely diver moves very deliberately. Their underwater gear resembles a space suit, and so it’s fitting that each step should feel like that of an astronaut exploring an unfamiliar planet. The animation is startlingly good, in fact, with a tangible sense of weight and effort in every action. Character, too: our hero doesn’t press buttons but thumps them, and there’s something pleasingly rudimentary about the way they swing their heavy-duty gaff to whack the more threatening sealife.
You’ll also use it to strike metal objects, the resounding clang producing sound waves that highlight local objects of importance on your map – from extra air tanks to save points and mineral deposits. While there’s always a glowing marker somewhere in the distance to give you a bearing, you’ll usually need to visit a few of these markers beforehand. Any resources you chip out from rocks, or pick up from dead flora and fauna, factor into a crafting system that fits the game and its fiction, rather than simply adding more busywork. You use these supplies to repair tanks that have been cracked from prolonged contact with ice (or the maw of a large, razor-toothed fish, or even from a long fall). They also refill your harpoon’s ammo stocks, or let you increase your carrying capacity. The most important ones – clearly marked as such – boost your suit’s capabilities, causing the red danger line to sink ever lower and opening up more of the map.
Your dwindling air supply, meanwhile, means you need to think more carefully about how you explore, rather than just where. If you’re smart, you needn’t worry too much about it: there are plentiful air pockets and save points that restore your tanks to capacity, and you can excavate more of the latter with the right resources. But then a single encounter with a larger beast, or simply using your suit’s booster too frequently to get around more quickly, can suddenly leave you desperately short – the muffled gasps when you’re close to asphyxiation will have you holding your own breath. You can conserve your supply by slowly climbing rocks instead of boosting over them, but a Breath Of The Wild- style stamina meter means you might just need a little extra kick to reach the top.
Those markers, gleaming in the darkness of the unfinished map, are usually guiding you towards evidence of intelligent life. But otherwise this feels like a wholly organic environment: not a place built around the player’s capabilities, but one that’s indifferent to them. As such, it can occasionally be tricky to negotiate, and sometimes that’s not entirely by design; only via the mini-map can you see that certain apparent dead ends are actually foreground scenery that you can pass behind. Some of that awkwardness comes as a result of the controls, though up to a point it feels baked into their design. Your suit should be a little unwieldy. It should be difficult to move around underwater while aiming an electrified rope at a ravenous monster. You won’t always be sure if the odd slip is down to the icy environment, the minor shortcomings of the touch controls or your own failings, but as you scrabble for a solid footing your pulse will quicken regardless.
Otherwise, for long spells, this is oddly relaxing stuff – the natural tension that comes with the territory notwithstanding. The soothing soundtrack has a part to play, evoking a sense of eerie mystery rather than fear. With its hypnotic loops and melodies that sound as if they’re being played backwards, we’re reminded at times of Pikmin, of all things. It’s when the music drops out entirely that you instinctively clench: something bad is usually about to happen, though Capcom doesn’t always follow through. Then a horrible deep-sea monstrosity arrives and the subsequent battle plays out over a progrock wig-out, complete with a triumphant drum solo.
Just the right amount of weird, in other words, and the game keeps its moments of strange wonder and tension in harmonious balance. Before too long, you’ll locate a submarine, which itself resembles a strange creature from the deep. It’s empowering, too: you’ll use its drill to bore through huge tranches of ice to open up new areas, and there’s no denying the pleasure of blitzing the creatures that had been causing you such problems in your suit. There are, naturally, channels that are too narrow for it to pass through, but you can keep yourself tethered to it via an umbilical cable. At least until a nerve-wracking set-piece where spikes of ice suddenly burst from the walls, severing your connection and sending you plunging down a deep crevasse.
Too slow? Occasionally. Too linear? Perhaps. But Shinsekai is a genre piece with rare ambition, a mobile game that feels at once tailored to the format yet unusually expansive in its scope. As a launch title for Capcom and Apple Arcade, this could well be the start of a fruitful relationship.
The game keeps its moments of strange wonder and tension in harmonious balance