#aquatico

Happy World Water Day! Have you drunk water today?

It's too late to really dig into Surviving the Abyss or Aquatico, but I like the dichotomy between both design conceits.

The first one understands that if you're going, well, abyssal, then it'll get mighty fucking dark real fucking quick. It'll get cold, too, so you need light, heating and enough material to survive the holy-shit numbers of metric tons of water pushing down on you without getting pancaked. It even posits that nobody would get down there and live there without some really illicit reasons. This isn't so much a Goldfinger send-off as it's a fanwank on the concept of government black sites. As in, it gets grim if you don't really manage stuff competently enough.

Then there's Aquatico, that barely leverages its own post-apoc setting and that very quickly goes for something that's notably more chipper. It's less about building where there's maybe the occasional weirdo octopus and transparent fish and more about building something that goes well with the nice widdle coral reefs and the pretty shallow-water fishies. This one's extremely light on the mechanics and has one or two odd choices that kind of bug me, somehow.

Take your living arrangements, for instance. Everything related to maintenance or production is built on the seabed proper, while everything related to housing goes in an elevated dome that couldn't possibly hold together atop its widdle spire if it wasn't buried under several hundred meters of seawater. Not thousands, seeing as the color palette and visual design both work real hard to suggest that sunlight does get through to you - I hope you like those caustics - and the meta seems more concerned with showering you with abundance even on its hardest setting than it is with getting you to micro-manage a settlement.

On the plus side, Aquatico lets you name your cities. If you don't go for something trite and obvious like New Atlantis or R'lyeh, you're made of sterner stuff than I am.

A common con of both games, though: both of them really want to nail the whole "underwater" aspect of the sound design. The problem is that everything is kind of muffled and you get a constant subtone that sounds like your ears getting clogged. On a long enough timeline (20 minutes for me) that leads to massive tinnitus flare-ups.

New gameplay trailer explains the features of Aquatico ahead of January 12th release

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Build Your Own Rapture This January in “Aquatico” | #gaming #SciFi #Steam #PCgaming #AndrewRyanWasRight

“To build a city at the bottom of the sea: insanity. But where else could we be free from the clutching hand of the parasites? Where else could we build an economy that they would not try to control, a society they would not try to destroy? It was not impossible to build Rapture at the bottom of the sea. It was impossible to build it anywhere else.” –Andrew Ryan Publisher OverSeer Games…