![]() Much of your mission revolves around the flying figure of a girl, wrapped in a flapping yellow raincoat, whose spirit is split and scattered into darting sprites. ![]() There are portions in which the sea level lowers, as if the plug has been tugged free, allowing you to wander on dry ground. There are stretches of simple platforming, in which you avoid the water for the monsters that lurk and yearn for your flesh. Is the image of a girl cut adrift from her family and pulled by the current of seclusion not powerful enough? ![]() Some are monstrous forms of her loved ones – taking on their voices – and we really don’t need Kay’s commentary: ‘Wait… that monster… It seems… familiar!’ Later on, Kay asks, ‘How are you supposed to stop helping and start letting go?’ which sounds less like dialogue and more like a chapter from a pamphlet on parenting. Monsters patrol beneath the boat, bearing a resemblance to Kay – the same red eyes aglow and the skin as impenetrably black they chastise, and chisel at her confidence, beckoning her to throw herself in. It isn’t as if the game’s depths are that difficult to fathom. I only wish Geppert, in her admirable mission to transform her own isolation into art, would trust us to do our own navigating. Likewise, to feel the slosh and slap of water in places it was never meant to be is perversely compelling. The reason The Last of Us dazzled me had as much to do with seeing buildings in a losing battle against grass and creepers. As you gaze overboard, you see the bottom halves of cafés and apartments blue and rippling below, and you feel not only the dark, secret pleasure of catastrophe but the double joy, which games are unsurpassed in their power to infuse, of seeing the old from new and unexpected angles – the world from a different height, cast in alien colours. ‘It reminds me of Venice,’ Kay says, as she motors gently down the streets, her boat leaving a frothing wake of white. If it is a dream, it’s periodically a very pleasant one, especially in the game’s early moments, spent in gentle exploration. When they appear, the clouds and waters are inked with darkness when they are banished, all turns sunny and still. Kay wears a bright orange backpack, which she uses – just like a Ghostbuster – to gulp up globs of ‘corruption’ that ooze through the air. It’s a good question, and one we’re left to ponder, with Kay offering up some novel suggestions: ‘This has got to be a dream, right?’ (Maybe so, but what then of the bottled messages scattered throughout, as if others might inhabit the same space?) As is par for the course with this sort of game – think Celeste, Gris, or The Gardens Between – obstacles and puzzles are as symbolic as they are logistic: problems are mountains, moods are colours, and clues are manifested memories. ‘Where did all this water come from?’ Kay wonders aloud. But then ‘“Hope” is the thing with feathers,’ as Emily Dickinson wrote, able to reach us even ‘on the strangest Sea.’ So perhaps we are given the glint of a way out. It’s a fitting design, and the subtlest storytelling in the game our heroine is marooned, smothered by a downward-dripping mood. She’s a sight to behold: her eyes glow red, her body is black, and her arms and legs are feathered, giving her the oily look of a beached bird. ![]() The game opens with a message from the game’s writer, and art and creative director, Cornelia Geppert: ‘Sea of Solitude is a personal project about loneliness inspired by my own experiences.’ The camera sweeps above the waters and looms over a drifting boat, in which sleeps Kay. But it isn’t long before the game’s title sinks in, and you realise that you are, in fact, piloting the choppy waves of metaphor, more than water, as Kay’s quest unravels. On the surface, it centres on a girl named Kay, who boats about in a half-drowned Berlin. Into this flood comes Sea of Solitude, made by Jo-Mei Games and published by EA. Which brings us, of course, to Submerged, a sunlit vision of the world’s watery end. More recently, there’s Oakmont, in The Sinking City, but, true to its name, it was only half submerged. First and foremost, there’s the underwater metropolis of Rapture, in BioShock, an art deco dream whose bubble burst at the bottom of the North Atlantic. If you want to see a sunken city, then you’re spoilt for choice when it comes to games.
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