Reveal The Deep
Platform: PC/Steam, iOS/Android
Developer: Lazy Monday Games
Premise: Explore the wreck of a 19th century steamship through puzzle-platform mechanics while piecing together the story of what happened to the ship's crew and cargo.
Release Date: 04/12/2015
So I was browsing the Steam listings the other day, trying to find something to review (lest I have to post another Press 'X' to Rant in lieu of an actual review), when I found Reveal The Deep, an Indie exploration game with a Steam blurb that ticked all my boxes: interesting mechanics, strong story focus and most importantly, short enough to get through that I would be able to play it through in time to write this article. But enough about my lack of forward-thinking, let's talk about the game.
The asking price of $0.99 gets you three chapters of game, taking you through various sections of the ship while solving platforming puzzles and peeking through people's diaries, which have somehow a) gotten scattered around the ship as opposed to being in one book as diaries tend to be and b) have somehow survived almost 100 years under water. Semantics aside, the story does a good job of selling you on the characters; an explorer/assistant to the resident professor, Beatrice (who, near as I can tell is mostly just there because it was the next ship that was going to England), and some other bloke writing letters to his wife back in England about how the ship is getting real spooky real quick.
The tone is further enhanced by the stylistic choices: Because of the limitations to the technology of your early-model fishbowl diving suit, you have a visibility cone about as wide as a guard in a particularly forgiving stealth game from your headlamp. You are occasionally required to turn said torch off to solve perspective puzzles with the lights from the ship, revealing new platforms or gaps in other ones. Holes in the hull of the ship reveal the outside world, further enhancing the feeling that you really are alone down here and, along with piles of gunk and rusted walls, help give more of a sense of how decayed the wreck is. Lack of music is made up for with the ambient noise, creaks and groans from the ship that you're fairly certain you didn't cause, muffled bubbles from your suit and loud thuds occasionally resonating from far off-screen help to build a suffocating atmosphere.
This does, however, lead into one of the games main failings: It builds a great atmosphere, but doesn't really do a whole lot with it. It definitely has its properly scary moments; a shark jumping out from a tear in the hull, and a point where you descend a ladder to find a row of empty doors before your light turns off suddenly. Turning the light back on reveals that the doors have all suddenly shut. However, these moments are few and far between, averaging about 1 or 2 per chapter. Most of the terror comes from either the persistent dread from the atmosphere or not knowing if you've looped around the ship and might be about to fall onto the instant death spikes again. Speaking of which, the spikes were an interesting (if somewhat out of place) mechanic for the first few minutes; walking through them horizontally does no damage but falling onto them from above does, but it soon started testing my patience after I'd died and been sent back to the start of the chapter because I'd lost track of how far the ship had looped me around to find that the ladder shaft I'd just dropped down from landed me straight on top of them.
While we're talking negatives, I should probably mention the motion speeds; The walk and jump animations are slowed down to give a sense of being underwater, but they're slowed down just enough to start wearing on your patience if you miss a platform a few times in a row. The animation to turn the light on and off is also slowed down to an almost unbearable degree, but realistically this is only a problem if you're running on a time limit or, as I did, mistook about 3 areas in a row for areas that required the no lamp perspective puzzle mechanic. In addition, because of the game's hypothetically short length there's no opportunity to save mid-chapter, the only checkpoints being at the start of each of the three sections of ship. This led to some annoyance when several times during the first chapter I got stuck on a puzzle and could only reset my mistake by restarting the chapter and around 20 minutes of progress with it.
There's enough to recommend Reveal The Deep in the story and atmosphere but it doesn't come without its qualifiers from the shorter length and slower movement speeds to pad out the playtime. At the end of the day, if you've got some Steam credit burning a hole in your pocket (metaphorically or literally), then there are worse uses of around 2 hours.
As always, anyone has a recommendation for a rant topic or review or just wants to say hi can email me at pressxtoreview@gmail.com
-Harry
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