I think Thalassa is another game where I wish there was a meh option, but on reflecting on it I decided on a thumbs down as it leans more in that direction, because while on the surface it seems competent, I think it fails as an interesting mystery game and as a story that examines grief and moving past this, which are it’s primary objectives. It also has many numerous minor faults that as a whole add up to be deeply irritating. This review will contain some spoilers as it is hard to talk about the flaws without them.
As mentioned on the surface it’s decently competent. It has very nice stylised graphics, a decent soundtrack and altogether delivers atmosphere when you explore this sunken ship, flowing between melancholic, slightly creepy to even a little bit cozy at times. Characters are well voiced and are well animated during flashback sequences when the ship was still afloat. It was somewhat interesting exploring the ship and generally seeing the relationships between the various characters and how the ship came to be sunk. The game delivers some initial shocking scenes that sucks you in, and I didn’t expect to see someone drown in their suit, pleading for their life, and dying with their eyes open, in a PEGI 7 game.
This is all well and good, but as mentioned it comes with a parade of irritations. Firstly, while it mostly ran at 120fps for me, it would stutter periodically, and while the fps would never fall below 80, it was still noticeable and jarring, especially as the game is not cutting edge. Secondly, the games animations when examining clues and items is painfully slow, and this is a problem since this is much of the gameplay. Listening to audio logs will lock you in place and leave you unable to move, unlike other games, and when examining documents or photographs, your character will always slowly examine the back despite there never been anything of interest there. While I understand that the developers wanted to create a sense of weight being underwater, you could achieve this still and cut the animation time by half. There’s also significant backtracking, and this is annoying when you’ve already searched a room but the game won’t let you interact with items until you’ve found other clues and further uncovered mysteries, though at least the map shows you Resident Evil style which have clues.
The game has irritating game logic, for example blocking a door off in a kitchen until you can find a knife to pry a lock open. That’s a specific item you have to find later in the game, despite the fact you are right next to a kitchen with visible large knives in it.
The game also has numerous mistakes and anachronisms. The game is set in 1905 but does not make good use of that period setting other than having a nice style to the ship. Characters use more modern language and have modern attitudes, there’s a poster in a key character’s room that’s very obvious and from 1910 with that date on it, and numerous similar issues. Our character is a diver, but instead of being in a heavy old metal diving suit with a breathing hose, wanders around in quite a light suit, with it’s own oxygen tank, and a radio link to a man up top. None of these anachronisms are ever addressed, and you could have moved the plot to the 1960s without changing much other than the style of the ship.
Indeed the time period also impacts the characters, who feel eye rollingly twee and overly diverse for a 1905 setting. The dread hand of modern writing hangs over this. To be fair there is no ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ quippy dialogue, and the characters are not all talking like they are in therapy, but they don’t feel like they are from the period. It’s a broad diverse cast, like a checklist, with a Norwegian, Irishman, Jamaican, Syrian, Haitian and American of Chilean descent.
The Jamaican crew member, Kaymar, is set up to be a saint, unlike the rest of the crew he never really makes a mistake. Yet at the same time there’s a subplot where the teenage daughter of the ship’s owner, a wealthy heiress, tries to romance him. It’s treated as if it’s a modern day thing, he feels awkward because it’s embarrassing and inappropriate considering the age gap, he lets her down gently, and they agree to be friends. Except this is 1905 and he’s a black man being propositioned by a young American white woman from a wealthy family. That should be a very difficult and potential very dangerous situation for him to be in with the potential for it to end very badly for him. None of this is addressed in the game’s story.
It reminds me of Eternal Threads, which on reflection feels like the same genre, uncovering a mystery and viewing flashbacks of the characters and their personal drama. That had a black character, Tom, except he felt like he fit into that world and was just another character. While he was established as a good hearted character, he was also a bit thick and did dumb things, and this made him feel human and I invested in his character, along with the others. The characters in that game, despite just dealing with domestic problems, felt a bit flawed and with some edge, and this made them feel more human and likeable. Meanwhile Kaymar is presented as just always being the best, and any conflict is just a misunderstanding.
The game seems to want to tell the story of how miscommunication and under resourcing can cause catastrophic consequences, but never follows through on this. Rather than Kaymar being presented as burnt out, and doing an increasingly sloppy job because of how overworked and pressured he is, instead he’s just shown to be diligent and wonderful, while increasingly bonding with the other crew members. The other characters get some distrust between each other, but the narrative just steers them towards all learning to get along, rather than the increasingly stressful situations fraying nerves at all.
Finally we come to the crucial failings. Firstly the mystery element. The game has you put together clues on a mystery board to uncover more information. Except this isn’t that interesting. As mentioned it becomes clear midway through the plot that the game is steering towards it just been an accident rather than sabotage, but there’s no great exploration about how circumstances and stress can cause this. Meanwhile the actual mechanics of this are boring, you select different clues and logs, yet there’s often limited context and several clues that essentially overlap in meaning. So I found myself brute forcing in several mysteries, which isn’t hard to to, and this means it’s unsatisfying.
Lastly the game wants to examine grief. Your character is a crew member but off the ship due to great personal loss, and is now coming back to explore and come to terms with what happens. All well and good, except the game doesn’t give you enough time with the characters early on to establish a connection. That still might not be fatal, many narratives over grief don’t burden us with spending ages with the dead character, but they convey it via the character experiencing the grief, which we as the audience can connect with. But here the geniuses who made the game made the player character a silent almost blank character, so we can’t connect in that way. Because the cast are rather twee then the sequences trying to show loss, grief and PTSD come across as mainly a bit annoying. It then ends on a rather damp squib of an ending, which technically has a difficult ‘choice’ but because the game failed to connect with me it was easy to make the right decision.
It might be worth a punt if you want an atmospheric old style diving experience, but don’t expect a compelling story or mystery game here. It is at least fairly short and to the point, with it clocking up at 7 to 10 hours, so I was content to see it through to the end, but overall it’s value to me was considering it’s writing failings and how other games/fiction did similar things better, and as may be clear its writing deeply irritated me.
