UNDER THE WAVES
Come on in, the water’s lovely
At the core of Under The Waves is a love of the sea, and a desire to protect it from reckless human endeavour. These are feelings Ronan Coiffec, CEO of Parallel Studio, and the game’s director, has long nourished, and first tried to render digitally some 15 years ago. As a resident of Brittany he had seen the impact of oil spills in the Bay Of Biscay, so he wanted to create something that touched on the tragedy of the damage they caused. “I started a little project to learn game design, visual art, things like that,” Coiffec explains. “It was a 2D sort of platformer. You were able to pilot a little submarine. You were also a diver.” The aim of the game was to record oil pollution in the water, revealing text that told a story in the process.
It was only when Coiffec and his team were brainstorming a new project three years ago that they decided the concept remained buoyant. Certainly, the environmental themes have grown no less relevant in the interim, and that was a key consideration for this reimagination. “We’re really interested in using videogame mechanics to communicate [social] messages,” Coiffec says, “so for us it was a good start to create something with that kind of idea.” Combined with this food for thought is a personal story, in which main character Stan takes a job for an oil company, which demands he live in an undersea structure and run maintenance on the pipeline by himself. It’s a lonely existence, but one that Stan welcomes since he’s dealing with grief. “It’s an experience we all have,” Coiffec says, “trying to find some solitude to reflect on life.”
One of the motifs in Under The Waves will thus be memories of a lost past, which is manifested in the aesthetic as well as the plot.
The game’s retrofuturist technology, from Stan’s yellow mini-sub to the valve wheels in his underwater bunker, evokes warm recollections for Coiffec in particular. His father was a sailor, he explains, and “when I was young, I spent a lot of time working on the boats, on that kind of old vintage design interior”. There’s also a wider cultural reference here to the sea documentaries of Jacques Cousteau, right down to a cinematic grain effect, intended to induce a ‘madeleine de Proust’ that triggers empathy with the ocean. Indeed, while there will be darker moments in the game, given Stan’s state of mind and the role of the oil company, the intention is to contrast those against the “poetic” beauty of the sea.
Parallel is equally aware that conjuring such poetry requires a sense of adventure, and while Under The Waves is a narrative-led experience focusing on Stan’s life in the underwater facility, there’s plenty of exploring to do too. You’ll have missions to choose from, such as repairing structures and checking machinery, which involve some light dial-twisting and the like, but will also take you farther from base, opening up larger areas to enjoy at your leisure later on. The game is structured around a daily routine, Coiffec says, and “each time you go to sleep, you jump to a new day”. But your bedtime isn’t set in stone. “You can just not go to bed and explore the ocean at your convenience,” he adds. Voyages can be undertaken in scuba gear or inside your one-man sub, and should give you an opportunity to meet the local sealife as well as discover wrecks and caves and gather materials to craft into upgrades.
If collecting pieces of plastic and metal sounds less than poetic, however, it will hopefully be merely a means to engage with the environmental themes, and to nurture that love of the sea. “We would really like to create an attractive world for players,” Coiffec says, “not just to follow the story but to really infuse with the background around them.”
“It’s an experience we all have, trying to find some solitude to reflect on life”