Piloting your sub works well in open water, but swimming and walking around more cramped interiors highlights the mild clunkiness of its controls. Everything moves slowly and deliberately underwater and your sub comes with infinite oxygen, even if it does need occasional repairs and refuelling. Taking to the seas in a mini-sub, which you frequently disembark to collect floating rubbish for crafting to interact with Jo, your pet seal or to pick your way around confined interiors, exploring the ocean depths is just as relaxing as Stan hoped. Maybe that’s just as well given how many other games use survival horror elements to create tension, which Under the Waves delivers through claustrophobic underwater spaces and a gradually dwindling oxygen supply. Its other plot devices, which appear to be pointing towards some sort of dalliance with the supernatural, never go anywhere. Under the Waves’ environmental campaigning is a bit heavy-handed, although its focus on seaborne pollution doesn’t entirely subvert its themes, which are as much about processing sorrow as cleaning up oil spills.Īnd it doesn’t take long to show you why Stan’s grieving. With frequent nods to real world eco-NGO, the Surfrider Foundation, Under the Waves includes copious information about its aims and work.Ī bit like building a game around the strict rules of a licensed IP, crafting a story around a message, no matter how noble the cause, can lead to problems. While you’re busy fixing oil leaks and picking up plastic bottles and other flotsam from the ocean floor, your employer is polluting on a monumental scale. Stan works for UniTrench, a fictitious North Sea fossil fuel drilling company with an all too realistic lack of environmental concern. It also shares that game’s somewhat melancholy emotional resonance, although quite a lot more happens in Under The Waves.

That sense of isolation, with human companionship over the radio, has more in common with Firewatch than it does other underwater games. The only voice you regularly hear, other than Stan’s self-narration, is that of Tim, your surface-based controller who gets in touch with work-related reminders.

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