Under The Waves – Preview, Adventure

Under the Waves

Where limitless freedom lures above the clouds in the best Reinhard Mey sense, people usually associate the underwater world with other feelings: in the best case, the submarine is perceived as mysterious or unknown, often the connotation is much more negative. Below sea level it is dark, threatening and of course there is no air to breathe. Issues such as claustrophobia and the fear of suffocation inevitably squeeze under the diving helmet. In addition, our survival there either depends on fragile technical equipment or people, even with fins, remain clumsy swimmers, at the mercy of the snapping jaws and twining tentacles of the sea creatures. Far below, in the abyssal plain, extraterrestrial horror lurks – no place on earth has been so poorly explored, no other zone so close to the hostile vacuum of space, nowhere else are there such unusual creatures. And if you do escape from them, then the head of the hurrying little person hurrying towards the air that promises air will literally burst…

Ever since Luc Besson’s Intoxication (1988), the theme of underwater adventure has entered Western pop culture, and of course there’s the progenitor Jules Verne with his proto-sci-fi 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (1869). The video game also deals with the topic again and again: Sometimes very playful like in Ecco the Dolphin, sometimes with an educational touch like in the instructive Wii adventures Endless Ocean. ABZ focuses on the aesthetics of underwater flora and fauna, Soma makes your blood boil, Silt comes without any shades of blue and the Subnautica titles stress you out with all aspects of the maritime struggle for survival. Soon Under the Waves would like to join this phalanx of sonorous names – again with a completely different approach: We are dealing with a leisurely exploration adventure that alternates between walking simulator, classic adventure and submarine simulation – and it’s a skill Retro sci-fi chic combined with human drama and supernatural appearances. The newly announced title was already playable for 30 minutes at Gamescom – join us for a refreshing preview dive…

The person behind the (diving) mask

I promised a double aha moment in the intro text, for that you first need to know something about the character. You play the professional diver Stan, who has dedicated himself to a lonely and not without danger job in the depths of the North Sea. After a personal loss, he wants to reorganize his life – that sounds a bit serious, almost melancholy, but the paper of a press release is also patient. With my hands on the controller, I don’t learn much about Stan at first. I look over his shoulder as he climbs into the diving cage to descend into the water. At the bottom, I direct his slow steps down a grate path into a flooded underwater base. Skill is hardly required, combination skills and a sense for finding the way at least a bit. What else I do, I’ll get to in a moment.

But even after 15 minutes, Stan is strangely alien to me, I only saw his comic-like overdrawn face at the very beginning, since then he felt like an extension of my controller into the underwater world, but not like a character. Only in the last third of the demo, when Stan has meanwhile arrived at the well-established base station, do we get closer. First he does a few routine things, then the weary-eyed bearded worker sits down behind a monitor and makes a video call to his partner. The couple, separated by countless nautical miles (and maybe a few other things as well), talks about their own relationship, about the time off that Stan’s job brings with it. And about the uncertainty of how things will continue afterwards. And that’s where it clicks: After just a few lines of dialogue, Stan and I are connected souls. Because Stan is a normal person with normal problems. Stan is like me. No zombie hunter or fantasy warrior. That’s why I feel for him, that’s why I want to know immediately what’s behind the problems between the two of them, what happened and if things can still be patched up. I absolutely have to play Under the Waves – that much is already clear.