I'll be writing here

There is cosmic horror, folk horror, body horror, countless more and then there's the psychological horror of Silent Hill.

Personally, it's the most terrifying form of horror. For someone who's nearing forty, regular horror isn't unnerving. What is unnerving is the thought that there exists a personal hell with no escape. That is the kind of horror Silent Hill tells.

Most of us live unremarkable ordinary lives. We wouldn't stand out in a crowd. Yet to ourselves we are the main character in our own story. We have our own private grief, guilt, regret, joy etc. The thought that we can encounter a hell, perfectly crafted for ourselves, built from our most private and deepest thoughts and horror is terrifying.

The protagonists of Silent Hill aren't saviors, or heroes or anyone noteworthy. They're your average person who wouldn't stand out from the crowd, just like most of us.

I've seen people age and die. How they become lucid, start hallucinating once their time draws near. The say that your life flashes before your eyes moments before you pass. What if it's your own personal hell instead?

A love story between two women which transcends death and identity.

One reborn through human technology as a Replika, while the universe resurrects the other as a bioresonant.

Fate brings them together and they fall in love again. A love so strong, it transcends physical form.

When things took a turn for the worst, they made a promise

The Replika dies countless deaths to fulfill the promise it made to the bioresonant, each iteration inching closer to completion.

And when the promise is finally fulfilled, is it the end of their love?

Or does it transcend reality, something which our minds cannot yet comprehend?

SPOILERS AHEAD

On the surface, MiSide is a cutesy horror game about an anime girl who pulls you in her own digital world and keeps you as a pet. It's cute, funny and sometimes scary. But deep down it taps a genre of horror of which makes me uneasy.

In any other sub-genre of horror, death is the ultimate end. You might be chased by a monster, haunted by a ghost or stalked by a serial killer. In each scenario, you can be assured the horrors would end with your demise.

How awful would it be if these nightmares did not end with your death? If you met your doom but had to relive it all over again? Stories told in Black Mirror, SOMA, Cyberpunk 2077, After Life (please read this amazing novella by Simon Funke) etc deal with the same idea. MiSide tells a horror story of the same nature.

Brief Story Recap

The game does not go in too much detail but leaves some to your imagination. You play a tamagotchi-esque game where you take care of a girl called Mita. After playing the game for over a month, your consciousness gets pull inside the game. It does not explain how or what happens to your body in the real world, but you realize you're inside the game now.

Inside the game, you're hunted by a deranged version of Mita, Crazy Mita, who wants to keep you trapped by turning your digital self into a cartridge. She has no objective, she just wants to torture you.

You're helped by another version of Mita, Kind Mita, who tells you that there is a way you can escape, but that requires navigating across various versions of the game. You go on perilous route across versions, running into other versions of Mitas while avoiding Crazy Mita.

At the end, Kind Mita makes you realize that the only way you can escape is by 'resetting' Crazy Mita. You ultimately manage to do that and it looks like you can finally escape this digital prison, however it was all in vain as the reset did nothing and Crazy Mita was successful in turning your digital self into a cartridge.

She managed to keep you, and many others before you, trapped in her beautiful digital prison.

The game never tells you this, but all Mitas in the game are working together to keep you 'busy' so they can buy enough time to finish copying your consciousness to a cartridge. The biggest hint was at the end, when you were able to directly navigate from the starting version of the game directly to the core.

If that was possible, why didn't Kind Mita directly send you to the core at the start of the game? Instead, she sends you on the longest trip possible.

What I can possibly say that hasn't been said? It was such an amazing remake. The best game I played this year, and quite possibly the best horror game I've ever played. I played the original game when I was much younger and I did not fully appreciate the complex story. It is only after I played the remake I understood how deep and complex the plot is.

The game made me introspect on James' character. Is he a bad person? He euthanized Mary on her request. He did what she asked, but his reasons for doing it was something else. He did it because he was tired of being held back by his sick wife.

The fact that he feels remorse for his actions speaks about his character. He feels burdened by guilt and seeks punishment.

In fact, his feeling of guilt is so strong that his subconscious hid the fact that he killed Mary, to protect him. It is by the end of his journey the town awakens the suppressed memory of what he did to his wife.

James would finally confront his demons and decide his fate. I like to think the 'Leave' ending is canon and makes the most sense. It shows James' journey of self forgiveness and moving on with his life, leaving his guilt behind.

Spoilers.

On the surface, Still Wakes the Deep is a horror game about surviving a Lovecraftian entity. Underneath, it speaks the story of Caz, who is striving to make amends with his family yet continually falling short.

SPOILER AHEAD

The events take place in an oil rig in the late 70s. An unfortunate incident happens where the oil rig drills into something unfamiliar. They accidentally released an entity which slowly starts taking over the oil rig. Crewmates who came in contact with the entity turned into grotesque lumps of meat hellbent into consuming others. The scariest part is that even though the consumed crewmates appeared dead, they still have parts of their consciousness intact. They called out to their fellow crewmates for help while brutally killing them.

Caz seems to be a very lucky soul as he managed to survive this onslaught. He got in touch with the remaining survivors and no matter how much they tried to escape, all their plans failed. Eventually, Caz began to lose his grip on sanity, he started hearing his wife speak to him. Events from the past, some real and some imaginary, echoed in his mind. Caz knew these voices were all in his head, and that the entity was gradually taking over his sanity.

Towards the end Caz realized escape was no longer an option. To prevent the entity from reaching shore, he had to destroy the rig, even if it meant sacrificing his own life. He would never see his family again, yet he knew this was the sacrifice he needed to keep them safe.

In the end, he blows up the oil rig taking himself and the entity with him. Whatever happened on the oil rig remained a mystery to the world. The news would report an unfortunate accident, but the world would never know the truth.

The game started with him trying to be the better man but failing. It ended with him making the right choice, despite knowing it would cost him the chance to ever see his family again.

I absolutely loved the story. People compare this game to John Carpenter's The Thing but to me it felt more like Annihilation. We never got to know what the entity was, what was its intention, why it transformed people into grotesque lumps of meat. Some things are beyond our understanding. The concept of why is very human, some things do not have a why, they just are.

I love media with themes of nuns, I remember watching Sister Death with my wife and enjoying it. I have to say I picked up Indika just by looking at the cover art, I had no prior knowledge about the game. Looking at the trailer I assumed it to a Monty Python-esque escapades of a Nun. It is, but it is so much more than that.

The Story (spoilers)

The story takes place in 19th to early 20th century Russia and is about a girl named Indika. She lived with her father who ran a bike shop. When she was 15 she met a gypsy boy, they became friends and soon they fell in love. The boy asked Indika to run away with her to the city where they can start a new life. Indika reluctantly agreed and the boy convinced her to let him steal money from her father's store. However, the boy gets caught stealing by the father. He drags him out of the store in front of Indika and asks her if she knows the boy. Indika was just a child and seemed to be scared of her burly and mean looking father, out of fright she said she didn't know him and her father shot and killed the boy right infrot of Indika.

This snapped something in her. Watching the love of her life killed in front of her own eyes by her father. She felt tremendous guilt, maybe if she had said she knows the boy her father would not have killed the boy. She did not want to accept her fault and blamed it on the devil. Ever since then, she started to hear the devil in her head, and blamed every bad thing she did on the devil. Her father after realizing this, sent her to a Nunnery to become a nun.

Fast forward maybe ten years later, the game starts with Indika performing the everyday chores of a Nun. She is disliked among her peers even though she is very polite to everyone. Probably because the orthodox people she is around do not like the fact that she has the devil residing inside her head.

One day she was tasked with delivering a letter for which she had to travel to another town. Things take turn for the worse however when Indika was cornered by a person who tried to rape her. Fortunately she was saved by an escaped convict, Illya. She felt indebted and helped Illya escape the authorities.

On her journey, she finds out Illya has a decomposing arm which he refuses to amputate. Illya is a religious man and he believes that in a farway land there is a rumor of something called the Kudets which performs miracles in front of your very own eyes. Indika decided to follow him to find the Kudets because she believes that it could also help her rid the devil from inside her.

Through out her journey, we get to see the human side of Indika, she seems to question her faith while still blindly following it, she shows sexual attraction towards Illya but still abstaining from it. Every time she would think of questioning her faith, we'll hear the devil talking and Indika would shut the voice up by conforming to her beliefs.

Things took an unfortunate turn however when the decomposing arm of Illya got progressively worse and Indika had to cut it off to save him. Once Illya realized that Indika cut his arm off, he was furious and decided to go find the Kudets alone. He believed he was special and the Kudets would allow God to perform a miracle and heal his arm. Because of this he thought Indika was jealous and did not want him to witness the miracle, even though she only tried to save his life.

They eventually reunited and finally managed to find the Kudets. It was a jeweled crown in a cathedral. The priest would not let them near it and in a scuffle he was shot and killed by one of his own guards. Illya ran away with the Kudets and Indika was captured by one of the guards.

She was taken to the gallows where was going to hanged for the murder of a priest. In an effort to save herself she decided to pay the jailer for her release with a sexual favor. When she was getting raped she spoke to the devil in her head who made her realize that god and the devil are only with her own mind, one cannot exist without the other. She managed to trap the jailer by throwing a cupboard on top of him and escape.

In the finale she reunites with Illya who seemed to have been wandering the streets as a lost cause. He sold the Kudets to a pawn shop as it did not perform a miracle. Indika visited the pawn shop and prayed to the Kudets herself in a effort to rid her of the devil but by that time she had already realized that it was all in her head. At the end when she looked at the mirror, she did not see the devil, rather she saw her own reflection.

Thoughts

Indika tells the story a young girl who did not have a direction in life. Just like every child she was not religious but was made to be one. She suffered from schizophrenia but people made her believe it was the devil whispering to her. Throughout her journey there were many events which made her question her faith but she never strayed from her path as she wanted to be a good nun. In the finale, when she stops seeing herself as the devil in her own reflection, the game leaves it for the player to determine if the Kudets actually rid her of the devil, or she realized that it's all a charade and stopped having faith.

Early 90's, a small town in India. My mother bought me a pencil box for school. Unlike the girls who got pink ones with Barbie princesses on them, mine had burly characters with yellow spiky hair and fierce expressions. I grew up watching 80's American cartoons and the art style on the pencil box was nothing like anything I had ever seen before. As a kid, I was blown away.

Every year, when the new school session started, my mother would shop for a bigger school uniform and replace any pencil boxes or lunch boxes I had broken. I would beg her to get me the ones with the same characters, but in different poses. I had no idea who or what they were, they just looked awesome. I used to fill the back of my school notebooks with my attempts to draw them myself. It was the only thing I could draw well.

In the late 90s, as the internet became more popular here, a few internet cafes opened up near my home. I visited them often. That was when I discovered where these characters came from. Dragon Ball Z. It was not long before our cable operator started airing it. It instantly became my favorite TV show. I would hurry back from school to watch it.

As I grew older, I learned more about it. I saw how much of a cultural icon it was in Japan, how much impact it had on the animation industry. I decided to learn more about the person who created it, Akira Toriyama. Of course, I had to find out more about him. He had made such an impression on me growing up. I found out about his other works, played the games he was involved in, read the DBZ mangas.

Without me realizing it, Akira Toriyama had a huge impact on me growing up. I'm in my mid-30s now and Goku is still the only character I can draw.

Full Spoilers Ahead

This is a game which made me introspect a lot. A lot into how fragile the mind is, how an event can change your perception of reality, making your mind hide from the truth and create it's own false safe space where you start living a lie.

Martha is Dead tells the story of a young girl, Giulia, who is incarcerated in a mental asylum. You, the player, have come to visit her and listen to her story. The game then lets you play as her where you relive the events leading to her admission in the metal asylum.

As you keep progressing through the game, you realize that not everything is how it seems, and by the end it will be evident that the entire story is how Giulia wants to remember it.

If you're reading this you have probably already played the game and are looking for interpretations on what actually happened. Here's my thoughts on this.

There was no one called Martha in Giuilia's family. She was the only child. Her mother was abusive and her constant beating and torturing led her mind to create a separate personality who was mute and deaf, Martha. Giulia believed Martha to be her twin sister who her mother loved. As Giulia grew older she met Lapo and they fell in love. Lapo knew about Giulia's condition, this is evident from the letter Giulia carries. One day Giulia finds out she got pregnant but she believes it was Martha who got pregnant, not her. From here the story gets convoluting as her mind shrouds her sense of truth with another layer of made up incident.

Giulia thinks Martha drowned in the lake and her mother is the one who killed her. Giulia then starts pretending to be mute to take Martha's place so people would start loving and caring for her mistaking her to be Martha.

What really happened is revealed by the end of the game where Giulia records her mother at gun point. She reveals everything to Giulia but when she starts revealing that Martha was only a childhood fiction of Giulia, she shoots her. Giulia's mind has reclused itself so deep that it has hidden everything that can harm Giulia, or break her sense of made up reality. No matter how much Giulia wants to remember, her mind stops her, in her own words, 'it's like pulling out your own teeth by your own hands'.

It all ends in me

I played a lot of games during the pandemic, but nothing left a lasting impression apart from three; Amnesia: Rebirth, Katana Zero and finally, The Medium, which was so good that it made me write my thoughts here, after almost a year. The story is convoluting at best and you have put the pieces together using various notes and echoes found throughout the game.

Impressions

The Medium satisfied a deep craving in me for something which had been suppressed for so long that I had long forgotten about. Early 2000s psychological horror. Games with rudimentary camera angles which focus more on exploration and surreal environments to drive the horror rather than monsters or body horror. Games that don't simply narrate you their stories, rather lets you unearth them by introspecting as you play. Games with symbolism which subconsciously define what's going on.

Premise

We play as Marianne, an orphan who has been moving from one foster home to another. This is because she has a supernatural ability to speak with dead spirits who're lost in purgatory, or as the game calls it, the spirit world. She finally finds a foster parent who accepts her for what she is, Jack. The game starts with Marianne performing the last rites for Jack, when she receives a phone call from an unknown number saying she's the only one who can help. Marianne, though reluctant but curious, travels to where the caller asked her to come and progresses to uncover truth about herself.

Symbolism

The inspiration from Silent Hill can be seen in a lot of place, although this game lacks combat, the similarities can be seen  in the symbolism it uses with monsters, the soundtrack and the art style. The game shows us that beyond our realm is a spirit world, where souls lost in purgatory are trapped eternally. Marianne has the ability to travel to this spirit world to free lost souls and to talk to them. The spirit world is heavily inspired from the art style of Polish painter Beksinski and is rendered beautifully. It is nothing like I have ever seen in any other form of media before. I have to travel into spoiler territory if I want to write about this, this part can be skipped if you want to experience it for yourself. The titular demon hunting you, The Maw, is born from the years of sexual torment endured by ~10 year old  Lilianne. Her spirit has split into two, the first one is an innocent little playful girl but the other one is demon who feeds on the souls of living beings and is powerful enough to project himself into the real world. The player does not know this fact at the start of the game but the hints are there. The Maw has wings on his back which resembles that of a butterfly or a moth, this can be related to Lilianne being interested in butterflies when she was young. When The Maw hunts Marianne, it threatens hear sexually with threats such as it wants to wear her skin, pretty little skin suit, this can be related to Lilianne's sexual torment. The Maw is hunting for the perfect host to enter the real world and it has found that in Marianne.

Another beast we get to see in the game is The Hound, which is the spirit representation of Henry. Henry was a cold and heartless KGB agent and his spirit self was a beast which resembled half human and half dog. Just like a guard dog, it guarded the innocent child self of Henry as a watch dog, threating any invader.

Lastly, I wanted to bring up the symbolism with Richard's spirit self. Richard's spirit self is a towering creature with long tentacles like appendages which slithers around. The tentacles depicts phallic symbolism associated with Richard molesting Lilianne when she was a child and his huge gargantuan self must be what Lilianne perceived when she was a child. She must have seen Richard towering over her when he did his heinous acts.

Conclusion

We do not speak of Deus Ex Invisible War. 

This is what you will be hearing most of the people who have played the franchise say. I’m one of the rare few people who actually love the game. So much that I decided to replay it, after more than two years. However, I’m not writing here the love of my game, rather how it makes me feel that I keep coming back to it.

DX:IW has always felt very bleak and dreary to me. The world feels very lonely, the nights gloomy and then there’s always the impending threats from opposing factions. Impending threats to the magnitude of entire city of Chicago getting decimated at the start of the game.

The events of Deus Ex triggers a social and economical depression. Something which was so significant that ‘The Collapse’ is something you hear every other person say. It leads to a massive divide among the rich and the poor. The Illuminati rises to power by forming two groups with opposing ideas and beliefs.

It’s certain that we cannot rid the world of religion. Mankind is curious and begs for a higher power. Religion is something which will always stay with us. Even if we find the answers to the all the unanswered questions in the universe, religion will not go away. Here is where the Order Church comes in. Overseen by the Illuminati from the shadows, The Order unifies all the religion to one. In hindsight, it’s a very brilliant move and even in real life, this is what should ideally happen. Although it’d take something as catastrophic as the The Collapse to trigger it.

Air traffic is non existent in the post-collapse world. Instead of commercial flights, there are only chartered flights. Weapons utilize universal ammo where one type of ammo can fit multiple weapons. The arms industry is led by Mako Ballistics with zero competition. There is a universal police system called the SSC with units deployed throughout the world.

The society in DX:IW feels like it has reached it’s peak, it is utopian but with the feeling that something is wrong. Can mankind progress after this? It feels like we have formed the perfect government but still poverty and suffering continues to exist.

The only solution the game sees is society being ruled by an all-power all-seeing AI. At the end of the game, if you choose the Helios ending, JC Denton infuses the world with biomods enabling him to oversee each and every single person in the world. A post-human civilization where privacy ceases to exist. DX:IW shows JC Denton as a metaphor for God. When you see JC frozen in stasis, he is not stored in some pod, rather he is frozen inside a glass monolith surrounded by white light. As a ruler, he does what a hypothetical God is supposed to do. Just like a benevolent God, he is overseeing. Unlike the other factions who wanted to seize power, he does not want to eliminate any of them, like he says in game ‘I have no enemies, merely topographies of ignorance ’

I like to believe that mankind reaches it’s peak after choosing the Helios ending. Throughout history we have seen the countless murders, genocides, pain and suffering. The old answers to tyranny are inadequate. The world needs a benevolent ruler who is free from all the flaws of mankind. Once it has that, we can only have limitless progress.

I can’t get into it and it makes me sad. 

I’ve had recurring dreams. Sprinting around the Covenant’s mausoleum, running towards the farm house, traveling back in time to get the Scythe of the Celt. I couldn't stop thinking about Undying. 

So much that I decided to buy it on GOG. I already had the pirated copy but I realized that I had never bought the game. Even though I’m going through an immense financial crisis, I decided to buy it. I didn’t start the game immediately as I was not finished with my second Deus Ex Revision run.

Playing Revision felt like a chore. I couldn’t stop thinking about Undying. I kept reading articles on it, watching various YouTube videos about it, reading more about Clive Barker. I just couldn’t wait for Revision to get over so I could start playing Undying. I wanted to experience it again, walking inside the Covenant Estate, the mausoleum, Oneiros.

Every day I’d build up the hype for my play through. I even read the 60 pages Covenant Album short novel. I just couldn’t wait. Eventually it was time to start the game.

I couldn’t get into it.

There are so many things I can nitpick about. The poor character models, the awkward placements of letters and diaries, but I knew about that. I’ve played the game several times before so why can’t I get into it? It’s not entirely off putting, there are some fun aspects to the game, like fighting the howlers. Taking them out with the revolver is very satisfying. Even fighting the never ending barrage of reanimated skeletons and those sand throwing Onerios beasts kept me on the edge, but not enough to keep me glued to the game.

I don’t know what it is. Have I just played enough games from my childhood? Even my last playthrough of Revision wasn’t as nostalgic as it used to be.

Hands down the best looking adventure game I’ve ever played. Before I even start talking about the story, I want to emphasize on how the graphics look amazing for a 3D adventure game. Other 3D adventure games like Syberia, Mobeius or Cognition doesn’t even come close.

Ok so let’s get started. The original Black Mirror triliogy was a series I had always read about ever since I started playing adventure games. I picked up the trilogy on Steam a couple of years back and although I didn’t enjoy them a lot, they were interesting and I even wrote about the first part here (http://illbeventingherethankyou.tumblr.com/post/138395658004/thoughts-on-black-mirror)

The reboot came as a surprise and not long after it’s announcement, the game came out on Steam. Picked it up immediately. My first impressions of the game was nice. I liked the visuals, the voice acting but the characters were unfamiliar. I was under the impression that it’d be a reboot but I was not expecting completely new characters. The new characters and story wasn’t bad though, I quite enjoyed it. It got a little confusing keeping up with the protagonist’s relatives’ names though. Maybe it’s only me but it was a little hard to keep track of who was who as you never see the characters, only hear of their names through other NPCs.

Like the original Black Mirror, the story follows a curse which haunts the Gordon family. In ancient times, the Gordons used a spell from the Druids to turn away the Romans, a spell which they could not control. However the curse was that the Gordon bloodline would be cursed to madness till the last survivng Gordon. Have to say the Gordon bloodline was quite resiliant. Even after a bloodline ending curse, they’ve managed to survive till the 1920s! 

You play as David Gordon. Growing up in India, you were away from the curse and the manor because your father wanted to shield you from the curse. You were however brought back to the manor once your father died to claim his inheritance, the Back Mirror castle.

Once you return you eventually find out about the curse as you start experiencing strange things. You started watching past memories and surreal things which explaining to others would get you called a madman. You start digging deep and find out that your cousin brother is trying to bring back the spirit of your grand father. Bringing him back would grant you both immense power of the Druids. You manage to stop him and watch the old wing of the castle crumble to dust.

That was the jist of the story. The journey is an interesting one which you should experience yourself.

Black Mirror is the modern route of Adventure Games. The game is trying to appeal to both modern gamers and fans of traditional point and click games. Personally I feel the game has done a great job of modernizing adventure games while keeping the original feel intact. I’ve seen a lot of people complaining how the developers have killed the franchise with their attempt to modernize the game, but I think they just need to take off their nostalgia goggles.

I love survival horror. No I'm not talking your generic zombie shooters, but the ones where resources are scarce and there's always an impending feel of dread. Where you don't feel like a gun totting super human rather someone who's underpowered against enemies.

Few such games which I can list from the top of my head are Silent Hill, Dead Space and Resident Evil. This niche genre isn't very popular among the general gaming masses so you're treated to such survival horror games once every few years.

One game which grabbed my attention was The Evil Within 2. It's the sequel no one asked for, except maybe a handful of people. I loved the first game but the sequel announcement caught me by surprise. I did not see it coming.

The Evil Within 1 came out in 2013. I played it when it as soon as it came out and I could only faintly recollect the story, I decided to replay it to gear up for the sequel. I have very fond memories of the game. It took survival horror back to it's roots. Pure Japanese horror, unreal environments, limited resources and the player controlled like a rock. The hard controls gave a sense of fear and helplessness .Winning even the slightest skirmish gave such immense feeling of satisfaction and relief. I loved the game. I loved the story, the game play, the character design and the spookiness. The game fits my definition of survival horror perfectly. The characters were memorable, I had haunting memories of Laura and The Keeper.

Finally the sequel came out. I didn't pre order it or buy it on launch day. Initially I had decided to buy it on sale but I'm not a very patient man. After taking a day to download, I finally booted it up. The game started with a very underwhelming title screen. Guess my expectations were too high after playing the first game. I played the game religiously for three days and after clocking in around 20 hours on steam, the credits rolled. And here are my thoughts.

I've heard a lot of feedback saying the sequel is better in every aspect but I disagree with that. I even find it surprising myself that I disagree. It's rare that I find sequels less appealing than the first game but it is so in this case. The first Evil Within felt like a true Japanese horror experience but I couldn't get that feeling in the sequel. The gameplay felt redundant as well. I hated the crafting system they introduced. All I did was scour for resources and it got really tiring. It was not fun at all.

The story was interesting though, I was sceptical initially. It's such a coincidence that all the important characters from the Evil Within series are from Sebastian's family. Sebastian was the guy who escaped STEM in the first game and it's his daughter who's the only suitable candidate to be the core for STEM in the second game. Coincidence? Actually no. As you keep playing you realize the story of Evil Within does not revolve around the main protagonist, rather his daughter. After around half the game, the story made more sense. Everything was explained and everything came around closing the circle. 

I did not like a few things however, such as how they didn't explain the unkillable ghost which randomly appeared and make everything freeze around her. She knew Sebastian by name and was certainly someone important. Throughout the game I was hoping it'd be explained who she is but the game completely forgot about her by the end. Boo.

The characters were interesting and memorable. Myra’s STEM version, covered in wax, was really cool. Obscura had an interesting design too and my god that laughing coagulation of zombies, those were the most memorable characters I found from the game.

What the game didn't do well was introduce the main antagonist. You only find out who he is after you finish half the game. Throughout you’re under the impression that you’re chasing some demented artist but ultimately he turned out to be a pawn for the actual bad guy. I found that to be pretty lame. Would have been nice to have one antagonist through so the game could have built up that animosity between the characters. Just a personal thought.

So I sat down one lazy afternoon and decided to play Submerged. It has been sitting in my steam library quite a while now ever since I bought the game on sale, dirt cheap. I finished the game in one go.

I had played the game earlier when I bought it but I couldn’t get into it back then. There was no challenge, you cannot die, all you have to do is scale buildings and collect supply drops. I found it tiresome and started playing some other game. It was only today, after 2 months of buying this game, that I realized how beautiful this game is.

PC Gamer’s headline of the game’s review says ‘Submerged tells 3 stories without saying a single word’. Rightfully so. The game narrates the story of Miku and Taku. Why they left their home to come to this destroyed city, what happened to the city that made it a concrete graveyard and the story which we actually play.

Submerged is the type of game I can play on a day off. When I have nothing to do. When I’m alone in my room and without any distractions. Only then can I see the true beauty of this game. The design aesthetics are gorgeous. The city is a sunken ruin. It’s like the middle of the ocean but only a few towers peeking their roof out of it. There are vines all over the water and the building’s ruins have weed and plant growth all over them. Some even have trees growing on top of them. This is a little absurd but the beauty lies within it’s absurdity. It looks surreal and fascinating. It makes you wonder what happened to the city and the people that lived there.

Throughout the game Miku encounters several creatures. They look like your everyday ocean dwelling animals except they have this weird green-turquoise growth on top of them. It could be a disease but I doubt it. There are no living people in the city except from you and your brother but there are these humanoid like creatures who are always in the shadows and hide from you as soon as your even close to approaching them.

Playing the game, it’s not hard to theorize that humanity has ended and there are only a few living humans remaining in this word. We have lost all culture and knowledge and have started anew. Hence the language Taku speaks is incomprehensible to us. Also she makes notes of landmarks she sees throughout her exploration and she makes everyday object sound so alien. Like, she sees this status of a horse and notes it down as an obdurate animal. She could have noted it down as a horse statue, or something along the line but rather she chose quite an alien title for it. I love games which are cryptic and lets the players decide what it’s trying to say. Games like these fascinate me and leaves me thinking about it even after I finish the game.

Also, not to mention the driving force in the game, love. The bond between a brother and his sister. Mankind has ended and we do not have any previous knowledge from our past but love transcends it all. It is not something which has to be taught from generation to generation but rather comes inherently. Miku’s brother was injured by their insane father so she takes him far away from their home to look after him. Every time Miku ventures out to the ruins to get supplies for her brother, she comes back with more growth over her body, which seems to be killing her. She disregards it and puts her brother’s well being over her. This seemed really beautiful to me. I know this thing about love is something which is obvious but we take it for granted in our everyday life and never really think about it.

The game was a little short, around 4 to 5 hours in length but it was sufficient. It would have been nice to have a better ending sequence but I’m not complaining. I had a good time playing this game and it was a nice and warming experience.