Under The Waves wants to tug at your heartstrings. It’s a narrative game that our preview - in Quantic Dream’s swanky new offices as they’re publishing developer Parallel Studio’s undersea adventure - drops you into an isolated chunk free of context. But it’s clear I’m supposed to feel sad in this single player game. I’ve already picked up a picture of main character Stan’s - potentially - dead family and listened to a few mournful story beats.
It’s hard to judge the content or a narrative when you’re coming in midway without getting the full context, but it immediately feels well-written and well-acted. Despite the fact it’s a narrative game, I just felt a bit of euphoria from being out there in the ocean that Under The Waves offers up. A lot of your time is spent fixing and repairing the deep sea machinery around the tiny facility where you live, isolated with your grief and surrounded by miles of deep water. It’s here you’ll be exploring the ocean floor and undertaking missions given by your boss, but it’s here you’ll also investigate something unusual that’s going on, which all starts when you start having hallucinations.
Even at this early stage, the game is very clever at revealing what is real and what is imagined, a byproduct of your main character’s grief and the life he’s leaving while exploring the bottom of the ocean. What is real is the sheer sense of wonder that you’ll get exploring and moving around under the sea. Movement outside of your submarine is fluid and easy once you get your head around how the character moves in an open space. While there were no real threats in the short section I got to play with, being here was terrifying and it always felt like something big was loitering just on the edge of my vision waiting to snap me up.
Get behind the wheel of your microsub though, and you can hit the turbos and explore huge swathes of your watery kingdom, in addition to reversing it into a fissure in the seabed so you can use its giant lights to look for collectibles. There’s a lot of freedom here, narrative sadness balanced out with the whimsy of nautical nonsense.
I also enjoy the eco-friendly message the game offers. Much like other survival games, when you run out of oxygen you die - that’s how being underwater works - but you can replenish this air reserve with little oxygen sticks. These are plastic and you’ll leave it floating in the water after you, but you can pick it up to get some plastic to craft with. It doesn’t feel like a game that should have a crafting system, but here it’s lightweight, allowing you to turn ocean-borne detritus into survival treasure.
Several parts of the ocean exploration experience would benefit from better signposting, but I’m content with what’s on offer here. However, whether the game sinks or swims - pun absolutely intended - will be down to the narrative, which we just haven’t enough of yet. The fantasy at the heart of Under the Waves is a good one, but I’m eager to spend more time down in the depths, and I’m hoping Under The Waves can offer up a compelling story for players to get their teeth into.
Under the Waves is an upcoming game for this year and comes out on August 29. It will be playable on PS5, PS4, Xbox Series X|S, Xbox One, and PC.
