In Other Waters
Who is the bad guy here?
FIRST-CONTACT situations tend to go badly in sci-fi. Aliens are generally resourcehungry asset strippers, perfect killing machines, or under threat from the Borg. With intellects that are vast, cool, and unsympathetic, they draw their plans against us. Fish? Not so much.
And yet here we are. The game’s setting of Gliese 677Cc is real, an exoplanet 22 light-years away that orbits within the habitable zone of its red dwarf star, itself part of a triple-star system. In Fellow Traveller’s hands, it's reimagined as an ocean world teeming with life below the surface, begging to be explored.
And so you do, through the game’s fantastic interface. You don’t play as xenobiologist Ellery Vas directly, but as her AI companion built into her diving suit. Thanks to the abstract way in which you view the world through the suit’s interface, Vas’s descriptions of scenes become the primary window on the ocean. This isn’t ABZÛ, where huge whales and shoals of rainbow-colored fish accompany you, it’s a game of waypoints and scanners, hazardous terrain and dwindling oxygen (the only price for running out is starting a region again).
There’s a plot about finding a missing fellow scientist, who hasn’t been seen since she splashed down on the planet, and the resource-stripping company you both work for (oh no). But soon the joy of exploration takes over from following your friend’s footsteps. And with no bad guy to defeat, the game has a restful pace, rather like an underwater holiday taken through Google Maps.
INTERCONNECTED WORLD You’re quite hands-on as an AI companion. Vas seems unable to operate the suit herself, which seems like something of a design flaw, but that does have the benefit of freeing her to observe and catalog while you worry about mundane stuff like movement. She sets an objective for a region and leaves it up to you to complete it. Your lab acts as a hub area you return to between regions, and it’s here that you analyze the samples you’ve collected and build a database of the planet’s satisfying alien life. Gather enough information about a species and you unlock a diagram, but each plant and associated life form is only a part of the larger web of life you uncover. Everything is dependent on everything else, while some creatures turn out to be symbiotic, incapable of existing without each other—a bit like you and Vas.
The slow pace and relaxed attitude is let down by a database-completion percentage—a score that makes no sense, as to know this fraction is to already know the whole, which is what you’re trying to discover. It’s a small irk and easily forgotten once you immerse yourself in the bright colors and atmospheric score. The frustration that you must see all this lush life second-hand through Vas’s descriptions threatens to set in, but this isn’t a game about exploring on your own, it's about being part of a team. Your input is just as important as Vas's, and this relationship is as much part of the game as the strange ocean you inhabit.
Simple on the surface and stylish all the way down, this is an ideal game for our less-than-perfect times.
VERDICT 8
In Other Waters
SPLASH Relaxing abstract exploration with peaceful score and an alien ocean.
CLASH Scoring feels wrong, the need to see things with our own eyes is strong.
RECOMMENDED SPECS CPU, 64bit, 2GHz. RAM, 4GB. GPU, 2GB VRAM.
$15, fellowtraveller.games, Not rated