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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