Aphotic Descent

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Occasionally the mood strikes to play a horror game but I rarely feel inclined to spend money on one. So few horror games bring fresh ideas to the table and very often it is just comes down to ducking around corners trying to find whatever passes for a key as the cryptid of the hour menacingly powerwalks after me. On other occasions it is a strictly scripted sequence of walking around an abandoned house as doors slam behind me and small ghost children laugh in the distance - I mean, I get it, I imagine it would be quite funny to watch someone bumble around in the dark groping for a light switch. And all of this to say nothing of the fact that horror games have a terrible problem with upkeeping quality, as though the devs expect things to be so dark that the player wouldn't notice that the monster has three frames of animation and a polygon count that can be tallied on one hand. Listen, nonagon noggin, my fear of geometry has been conquered ever since Bert and Ernie - if you had caught me prior to learning what a rhombus is there is a chance you could have gotten some confused screaming out of me like a Lovecraft protagonist that just discovered the concept of air conditioning. Ultimately this just doesn't do anything to me. What else have you got? "Go with me on this one: …Cyborg sniper shrimp." … Okay, you've got my attention. Aphotic Descent by Broiled Squid Studios is one of the better free horror games I've found on Steam. I know that reads like "this is the best pizza establishment I've found in the city on this side of the street, starting with the letter G" but it is true. I found it a few months back and had a quick play and honestly, it is pretty good! It managed to avoid two of the pitfalls I mentioned in the opening of this video and has actually made a lasting impression in my memory. Firstly, it is considerably deeper (heh) than just being chased around by Sliderman's cousin, rounddude, and you DON'T go walking through an abandoned house trying to uncover who you murdered. You'd think you would remember something like that, but it seems to be the first thing our morally dubious protagonists forget along with how to break windows and how to box. Listen, I'm just saying if you had the *OPTION* to bare knuckle brawl the lurker in the dark, it would be nice. Doesn't mean it has to go well. Speaking of things that don't go well for our protagonist, let's talk about the story. You're a dude on a sub going on a scientific expedition in the Aphotic zone. An Aphotic Descent, title drop. Something attacks your sub and you barely escape the wreckage before being turned into spam in a can. When you make it to the sea floor you find that the scientific outpost you were headed to has come down with a bad case of mad science and a serious uptick in fish based death. Your only hope is to aimlessly bumble through the lab, try not to become fish food, and presumably find a way back to the surface. First things first, I want to give special note to the art direction and general presentation. It is all very otherworldly in a way not dissimilar to subnautica - which has become the defacto measuring stick for underwater survival. A lot of the life you see falls in that same bioluminescent quasi-scientific feel that strikes a balance between the familiar and the fantastic. Despite being at the bottom of the sea, the environment is very colorful and full of life. It actually feels like the kind of place you'd take a school field trip to were it not for the man eating fish and multiple lapses in scientific ethics. The game is structured in a loose chapter system and each one is prefaced with some nice artwork and some pleasantly pulpy narration. As you go through the game, you'll encounter a number of data pads and audio logs. These will be what fill you in to the context of the who's how's and why's of the recent uptick in soylent green fish foods. No, I don't know why the white boards also have audio, maybe the lab needed a way to spice up presentations and power points were too mainstream, too current era, you sea what I mean? The voice work is a mixed bag in the best way possible. I get the sense that the devs just grabbed random members of the team and started poking them with barbeque forks until they gave the proper emotion. The work is undeniably amateurish but you can tell everyone is doing their best, which makes it entertaining if nothing else. I actually could establish character based on how they read their lines. The crooning tones of the scientists as they laugh about the absurdity of work place safety. Or the panicked and delirious speech of your lost crew mate as she starts talking to giant mutant crabs as though they are neighbors. It feels like everyone tried their best. Only part that really threw me off in that regard is that not every audio pad is voiced, and some are slightly delayed. So you never know if you're going to start reading only for some frothing PHD to start gushing about his beloved kelp or how much the lady scientist thinks her experiments are overreacting to being vivisected. And as I mentioned before, everyone seems so into it that I feel like if I read over them I'm interrupting something personal. The mechanics of the game are pretty simple, you are in a diving suit at the bottom of the ocean - you're lucky to not be meat paste, so it is understandable that you may be lacking in versatility. The only offensive abilities you have to your name are a random bowie knife and a blacklight. I don't entirely understand why my blacklight needs to charge up like I'm mega man in order to interact with purple objects, though I do appreciate the that the devs understand the horrors one can see with a black light - though here you only find different excuses to blind marine life with it. Arguably the real world version of the black light is much more horrifying, but considering what these scientists probably got up to it might be for the best the devs didn't go that direction. You do unlock a couple abilities as you progress through the game, including the ability to ascend in water and the ability to turn invisible for short spans of time and honestly it feels pretty stingy at times. These zooplankton are invisible their whole lives, they can't hide me for a couple seconds longer? Are they holding out on me or do they think it is funny to see me hide from the crustacean on the mossy knoll. Sadly this brings me to the third aspect of the game I mentioned at the start of the video. While the ideas, gameplay, and direction in art are pretty unique - the graphics, animation, and general feel of the game are a bit lacking. I know we're in a diving suit, but I wouldn't say "no" to being able to move faster than a snail's crawl. I can't even begin to list the number of times I'd use the underwater elevation and either juuuust barely fail to get out of the water and then wind up sinking into a corner that wouldn't count as ground and as such, wouldn't let me recharge my stamina for another jump, effectively soft locking me until the monster of the hour would come around to make people sticks out of me. That being said, I've yet to find a game where you are chased by both a cybernetic sniper shrimp and a human shrimp hybrid friend through an underwater swamp for the crime of killing their Frankensteined electric eel best friend and only narrowly escape because the local zooplankton blessed you with the power of invisibility. The fact that I cannot apply that sentence to any other game or piece of literature in history is justification enough for this game to exist and you should give it a look. It only takes a few hours to get through so check it out, though I wouldn't blame you if certain parts compel you to give your PC swimming lessons.