My recommendation of this game is limited to people who enjoy playing experimental indie titles. The Dive is not a good horror game, but it is certainly an interesting experience.
Approach it as if you were approaching a bizarre interactive art-house film rather than an indie horror game. The game is cheap and short, but it is rich in emotions.
The game begins with some exposition: there is a submarine sending a distress signal. The submarine most likely belongs to deep-sea miners of a very rare and expensive mineral. The main character is an opportunist who plans to dive, find the submarine, get those minerals, and escape before a proper rescue crew arrives at the distress signal. He arms himself with a speargun and a diving compass.
I love this exposition! In an unfamiliar lower ocean environment where sunlight barely reaches, there is mystery and danger. The main character is an opportunistic scumbag who is ready to rob a submarine in distress for his own selfish gain. It is up to the player to unravel the story. The game immediately had me hooked, and it lasted for precisely one minute and twenty seconds.
The main character dives into the water. The environment is dark and confusing; it's as if the darkness itself envelops the player. The only way to consciously navigate is to follow the compass. The main character informs the player that the goal is to the north. While swimming towards the north, one may notice a group of small, blurry objects moving at a distance. In such an environment, anything unusual is worrisome. However, when looking closer, one may distinguish these objects as a group of small fish. There is tension, and there is relief. After passing the group, one may soon notice a dim red light far ahead. After following this light for some time, submarine outlines begin to emerge from the darkness. That's the goal. There is tension, and there is relief. Several seconds later, a shark attacks the main character. There is surprise; there is annoyance.
Shark attack deep under the water? Sounds scary on paper. An immediate tension nullifier in this game, though. Before the main character reaches the submarine, a shark begins to quickly swim towards him. When it reaches the main character, the shark bites his legs and starts shaking its head left and right, fast. The player has to react and shoot the shark in its eyes with the speargun. And it is very, very hard to do. Shark eyes are small and move from side to side quickly. The player has to hit both eyes within 20 seconds with the speargun, which is not only slow to reload, but shoots projectiles slightly right and down from the cross hair. Needless to say, hitting two small moving targets in under 20 seconds with an inaccurate gun for the first time is nearly impossible. In fact, it will take NUMEROUS attempts to do so.
After each failed attempt, the game restarts at the point right after the initial exposition. So, the player will have to swim back towards the submarine and try to defeat the shark. It takes a minute to swim to the point of the shark attack, and it takes twenty seconds for the shark to kill the main character. So, every attempt costs one minute and twenty seconds of boredom. Given it takes several attempts and a bit of luck to defeat the shark, annoyance may quickly build up after having to swim through darkness again and again and again. The group of fish, the red light, and the submarine outline lose their emotional weight and become checkpoints to measure the distance to the shark: first, you pass the fish, then you see the light, then you see the outline, and then the shark attacks.
Defeating the shark leaves nothing but a bitter taste in the mouth. Tension and the wonder of what will come next are gone, being replaced with annoyance and a slight disappointment. However, these negative emotions reinforced one idea: the player really does not want to die. There is a risk of having to restart the shark attack again, and this prospect is more dreadful than any monster. That's why there's tension when the main character enters the submarine and has to restore the oxygen supply before passing out. However, unlike the tension in the beginning, this tension is not pleasant. The price of failure is too high. So when the main character's vision becomes a gradually decreasing funnel, indicating passing out from a lack of oxygen, there is a genuine fear. When I had to clean an electric board to make the oxygen generator run again, I had only one thought: "I don't want to die."
After restoring the oxygen, the main character passes out anyway. Then he has a very disturbing dream.
The main character dreams about being in a pool. The pool building is styled similarly to liminal space pool artworks: it is mostly lit in cyan colors, the layout makes little sense, rooms are big, and roofs are high. There is a sense of loneliness and melancholy. One may find a glass door leading outside and see that it's a dark winter night outside. I really like this location. There is a sense of peace and sadness about it. The main character informs the player that he has to get dressed. However, instead of clothes, the player will find a knife in a locker. Then, in first-person perspective, the main character cuts off his penis and apparently experiences sexual arousal as a result.
This cutscene is disturbing and shocking. It took me a moment to recover. I was glad for the main character to wake up. Upon awakening, there is a surprise: the crew member, who had appeared unconscious before, has awakened. Despite the main character lying that he is from a rescue crew, the crew member attacks him. Maybe in any other game I would at least have tried to find a peaceful option, but after the previous experiences of annoyance, fear, and shock, I had nothing but anger for the one attacking me. I felt zero remorse for killing this innocent man.
The game ends with the main character feeding the expensive, rare mineral to a huge fish outside the submarine. The reason I mentioned the huge fish only now is because it did not register with me emotionally at all. It is not scary, annoying, shocking, or else. It exists solely to deprive the player of the very thing for which the main character risked his life and the player suffered.
As if that wasn't nihilistic enough, the game solidifies the pointlessness of the whole endeavor by showing the main character getting eaten by a shark jumping out of the water while he is making his escape on a boat. Wow.
To sum up, the experience this game offers is unpleasant. It evokes strong negative emotions. But I like this game for exactly that reason. The game is not good, but it is not bland and boring. It's unique and provocative. Love and effort were put into it. Among sterile cookie-cutter horror games made in Unity or by a corporation, "The Dive" is unique and refreshing.
This game is like a painting by an artist who does not possess impressive technical skills but nevertheless did his best to express a strong emotion or idea: it's not very pretty, but if you give it a chance and look carefully, it will affect you.
Before finishing my critique, I will briefly list the good points about this game I have not yet mentioned:
• Atmosphere Design: very well-executed environments. Lighting and textures are able to create certain moods and emotions. Though, organic models, such as humans and fish, have a lot of room for improvement.
• The Main Character is Unquestionably Evil: There are not many stories that let you look through the eyes of an unarguably bad, screwed-up person. I genuinely felt uncomfortable playing as this guy. However, it fits well with the narrative of the negative emotions the game made me experience: anger, annoyance, loneliness, the sense of pointlessness, and boredom. I would imagine that's exactly how a psychopath would feel on a regular basis. No wonder psychopathy has a strong correlation with criminal behavior!
I enjoyed the game!
