I sometimes complain about story-driven games but in order to understand what I mean by that I need to clarify. I love a well-written story-driven game that is done nicely. What Remains of Edith Finch to this day is one of my favorite games of all time and that game poses absolutely zero challenge. You are not meant to be able to fail at the game, there are no lives, no tough sections, it is just an amazing story that you don't mind doing any of the walking around in because it is just such an amazing experience.
I think that Under the Waves is going for that sort of magic and there are parts of it where it looks like they might be headed in the right direction with this.
Unfortunately, along with this attempt at a fantastic claustrophobic and emotional story that is more about the human condition and loneliness than it is about working underwater, they have a bunch of things that you have to do in the game, and all of the things that I have seen so far have consisted of "go over there, pick up that thing, ok now go over there and pick up 10 of some thing... done with that? Ok now go WAAAAAAY TF over there and look for this thing then turn a lever and then come all the way back.
It's tedious and it started to make me angry pretty early on.
There are multiple ways of getting around that I experienced. You can walk with your weighted boots or magnetic boots - it isn't explained,- you can swim in a scuba sort of sense, and you also have a vehicle submersible. All of these things have different purposes that I was able to determine and all of them take entirely too long to get you to the destination that you can see in some sort of holographic sense on your map that pops up on your radar.
I'm not being a jerk here, it really does tell you to swim underwater 400 meters in that direction in order to look at a pipe and then turn a lever... I was getting so annoyed during this process because it all just seemed so pointless. Nothing at all happens during that 400 meters of swimming that takes probably 10 minutes or so and while the visuals are pretty good, they aren't mind-blowing or anything. This isn't exactly cutting-edge VR or anything like that.
I got mad when after turning the lever I was instructed to head back to where I had just come from and I already knew that it as a great big expanse of nothingness from here to there. Perhaps they were trying to establish a notion of how alone you are down there but they could have done that without wasting 20 minutes of my time.
Cruising around in your submersible is better I guess, but even that takes friggin ages to get from one place to the next with almost nothing going on in-between. You might get to look at a whale every now and then and this is basically the extent of it. Inside your living quarters under the sea, there is a ton of busy work in there as well including a computer with a mustache that talks to you as some sort of "buddy" that you have down there. All dialogue with this thing (as well as all the other dialogue that is cutscenes) are un-skippable and this to me is a massive sin in gaming. If your story is so good I wont need to skip it, but most of what was being said to me was just idle drivel and it wasn't compelling enough for me to want to sit through it especially when the subtitles are on the screen anyway and I can read faster than the words are being said.
I can't really imagine what else they would have you get into as the story goes on that would be able to mix up the gameplay. I've been scuba-diving, I realize that you cannot move fast and that's fine, but there's a reason why nobody makes games about that. From a "i'm controlling the action" perspective, not a great deal happens underwater and the fact that the people that made this went for realism about how fast a person could actually move underwater was a real slog and after an hour, I had enough.
Compare this to my favorite narrative/ story game What Remains of Edith Finch. That game probably had unskippable dialogue as well but I honestly dont remember because it was so good, so damn near poetic, that I didn't ever feel compelled to skip the dialogue. In Under the Waves I really feel like they are throwing in words just for the sake of having more words - very little of what you experience has any meaning in what your character is doing.
From what I could tell to before I gave up was that the character you are playing has had a falling out with his girl right before he took on this job and he has some sort of trauma involving an accident in his recent past. you know, the kind of stuff that would totally disqualify you from doing this sort of work where the person involved would definitely need to be 1000% of sound mind and capable of being alone with no ability to rejoin the outside world.
From the images and reviews that I am seeing but am unwilling to experience myself because of the tedium, the story really does come together in a pretty impactful way later on, but in the meantime you have to spend 20 minutes here collecting algae, half an hour there patching up a leaky oil cable, another 15 minutes collecting ingredients for some sort of recipe to make an item at your crafting bench that they possibly borrowed from Subnautica.
This game is rated very highly and I am going to be one of the people that recognizes that this very well could be a great corporate job simulation, but it isn't very exciting as something that you have to play.
Come to find out, you could have taken the submersible to look at one of those busywork chore quests that happen right at the start but I did not. It didn't suggest that I do so and this is why it took me ages. Bad design if you ask me.
Anyway, I can't in good faith recommend this to people out there because while I do appreciate artistry in games, I have zero tolerance for mandatory quests that are built into a story that are just stupid and appear to be designed to make the game longer than the story really has in the meaningful part of the plot.
It appears that this is really all there is to this game
- get told about something over there that needs a doin'
- go to that place that is easily accessed but is really far away for some god awful reason
- swim back - NO FAST TRAVEL even though nothing is going to happen on the journey
- lather rinse repeat
If there is a fantastic story in there somewhere I think that most people would be better off just watching a YouTube video of the best parts because there is no skill involved in this. It isn't hard to go to a beacon with enough oxygen to turn a lever and then swim back.
Boring!