Panthalassa is a point-and-click puzzle-narrative game that puts you in the seat of an anthro-robotic submarine that is autistically fascinated with fish. The puzzles are cool, and the narrative is bizarre(in a very, very good way) and the fish are funky. With as little spoiler as possible, the game will give you puzzle after puzzle that expects you to engage with the world around you, sometimes in obvious ways, and sometimes in odd and esoteric ways. It will expect you to engage with the systems it presents, and use some real-life tools to help make sense of the gibberish it spits out(once again, in a very good way,) such as calculators, note-keeping, sometimes taking screenshots to help you remember something.
But the thing about Panthalassa, is that it knows that it's expecting you to need these tools, and then will create puzzles that expect you to manipulate your tools in a way to figure out the solution. Once again, with little spoilers, there's a puzzle in the game that elicits a powerful 'a-ha!' moment, when you realize you need to look at the screenshots you took in a different way than it may initially seem. In puzzle games, this feeling is crucial to me, and got me locked into the game HARD afterwards.
As with the puzzles, Panthalassa's story expects you to keep a mental catalogue of the themes and oddities it pulls out on you. The story starts simple, and slowly increases more and more themes that may make it seem chaotic or jumbled, confusing and esoteric, before pulling them back in and introducing that one final 'click' that helps them settle into place, like a jigsaw. Most of(if not all) the story is presented in the form of text, so be ready for a lot of reading.
Artistically, the game never strays far from its visual presentation, opting to stay with the low-fidelity, almost ps1-era graphics. At times, it will play with perspective to make your mind fill in blanks on what you may be looking at. Most of the game takes place from pre-determined camera angles(à la Resident Evil), giving the game a very cinematic feeling at times, knowing when to play with your perspective, while also knowing when to keep it simple.
The soundtrack is bloopy and enjoyable. I personally really liked it. The UI is funky and esoteric, and even took me a little while sometimes to realize something was a button. Do not be like me--click around!
The few downsides of Panthalassa is that, I feel, the game can feel a little short. Once you get into the swing of the puzzle solving, and figure out the 'main' mechanics, it becomes easier to traverse the world and knock down what stands in your way. The narrative picks up the slack, in my opinion, but if you're not super enthused by it, I can imagine the last fifth of the game feeling like a bit of a slog. I think, though, that if you find the story interesting up to that point, it won't be a worry. Lastly, there's a 'traversal' portion of the game that feels tedious no matter what you do. It may be to give an 'aimless' feeling, and it -does- do that, but it also...IS aimless. And if you don't get all the content in them, having to backtrack is especially painful. After you get to a landmark, you no longer need the traversal method to return there, so that's at least good. I'd like it a LOT less otherwise.
Overall, the game is SOLID. If you enjoy introspective, philosophical queries that apply to your immersive mind and your real-world mind(think SOMA), along with puzzles that can be tricky, and dialogue that is constantly charming and leaves you wishing for more when it's over, then Panthalassa is REALLY worth a shot.
