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I have embraced the subaquatic dread of not knowing which button to press in Full FathomThat sinking feeling
That sinking feeling
Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun / Daemon House
Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun / Daemon House
The developer ofFull Fathomdescribes it as a “thalassophobia sim”. You are the lone engineer on a rustbucket submarine exploring the dangerous waters of a submerged country in an alternate reality 1990s. The warning lights on the control panel are flashing, a buzzer is spluttering like a dying bluebottle, and your robotic assistant is about as useful as an umbrella in the Mariana Trench. Things could not get any worse. And then you see it. Something in the green haze outside. Something with atail.
Full Fathom Official TeaserWatch on YouTube
Full Fathom Official Teaser
We’ve seen Full Fathombreach the surfacea few times in variousScreenshot Saturdaysbut now there’s aplayable demoas part of Steam Next Fest. In the most pitchy of elevators it is “horrorSubnautica”. You can leave your submarine to swim through the ruins of flooded skyscrapers and houses, salvaging for fuel tanks and canned food among other necessities. But you also need to pilot the submersible (albeit in quite an auto-piloty way) between numbered points of interest in the ocean.
Oh dear. All the lights just went out.
I can’t fully blame myself for the incompetence. This is your warning that the demo is quite hands-off when it comes to tutorials. There is some guidance in the form of pop-up hints but mostly you are left to figure out the details of all these buttons and cranks yourself. Your robotic anchormate will give intentionally useless advice and feels there to deliberately unnerve and enrage you with his Clippy-like face and passive-aggressive remarks. I enjoy hating him.
Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun / Daemon House
Meanwhile, there is a frame story that sits outside all of this, full of fun meta touches. The pause menu here is a set of controls mounted on the wall. A neon hotel sign reads “Alpha Demo”. An authentic looking exit label on the door reads: “This door will exit the game”. When you take a screenshot with Steam’s built-in screenshot key, F12, a camera flash goes off in-game. When leaving the pause menu for a long enough time, it will become a Windows style screensaver circa 1998. I think that’s cool.
It’s tough to stand out among the 1700+ other demos in Steam Next Fest, but if you are channelling the deep dread of Subnautica, the chunky UI ofNauticrawl, the panic ofBarotrauma, and the rust ofIron Lung, you will immediately have my eyes. It is deeply reassuring to me that, even after all these decades, game designers still know how to make pushing an unmarked button equal parts hilarious and terrifying.
For anyone who needs more recommendations of games of this type, but likes sci-fi more than sub-fi: try the delightful tactility ofObjects In Spaceor, more recently, the confused claustrophobia ofTin Can.
