The Sea Eternal

Приятная история. Интересная вселенная. Разветвлённый сюжет. Хорошее повествование.

Already played three times to get different endings. Loved it.

老暗黑童话了··· ···藏得真深。类似于什么呢，你可以按部就班走出白雪公主与王子过上了幸福生活所有坏人受到惩罚的传统儿童故事END，也可以走出白雪公主历经千辛万苦发现王子与其他隐藏人物不可告人秘密的成人童话END··· ··· 第一个结局：“就这就这就这？？？”不屑.jpg 多周目后：“艹，小丑竟是我自己。” 阅读量不大，用词日常。 关于时间， 离线的锅，我绝对玩了不止这么久。

It's difficult for me to say whether The Sea Eternal is a 'game' in the traditional sense or not. Unlike a visual novel, there are no graphics or music or sound effects, so if you expect a sensory spectacle, this is not for you. The gameplay loop, if you want to call it that, is reduced to reading, making a choice, and turning the page. The choices lead your character into certain diections, for example, "independent" versus "respected", and your stance with various characters. There are also achievements for several stepping stones in the story. If all this sounds like a game to you, I can definitely recommend it. As you can see from my Steam name, I'm a big fan of merpeople (mermaids and mermen) and transformations, so the content was definitely up my alley. The writing is beautiful and incredibly immersive, there are strong themes of identity and and the price of immortality, and strong world building. It should also be mentioned that there is a strong current of LGBTQA+ friendliness, featuring at least one trans character and several characters of unusual and even uncertain gender. If this kind of content offends you for some mysterious reason, then The Sea Eternal is not for you. It's a great game to just lie back and relax with your tablet with, immersing yourself in the subtlety of the writing and surprising yourself with your own role-playing choices and the occasional achievement. If I had one point of criticism, it would be that several important events are talked about as having already happened, going against the old writing adage of "Is this the most exciting part of your character's life, and if not, why aren't you showing us that?" Other than that though, the novel's numerous more action-oriented scenes do keep you on your toes. I will definitely be on the lookout for more content by this publisher, as it seems to have been made with genuine love and investment in the subject matter.

I'd love to recommend this game, but I honestly can't. There are some good things about it - the setting is interesting, the writing is elegant and descriptive and it packs a lot in, but where it suffers is both in terms of the pacing and indeed the extent to which there's three or four stories all struggling to breathe in such a short period. Accepting that one can go too far the other way, the speed at which you're thrust into the game means it's very hard to really care about your protagonist, especially when most of their past decisions have been made for them, and by the time you're beginning to form a personality for them, the game is already over and you've got to start again - my first playthrough maybe took 40 minutes and my second took a lot less once I'd waded through the unskippable establishing plot points. Equally, the issue is that because there are so many different threads to be pulled, you maybe have time to pull one of them every playthrough, and equally it's not clear what sort of playthrough you have to do in order to get them apart from by trial and error, especially when most of the non-status quo endings are hidden behind a very specific set of checks which force you to play in a very specific way, and which equally seal off all the other arcs behind you. I don't mind the concept of wanting to encourage a player to replay a game to get the full effect, but the amount of faff you have to put in for the rewards you get in a second or a third playthrough isn't worth it. All in all, worth a look if you adore the writer's work or you like mer-stuff, but for someone who bought more on the reputation of the studio than anything else, it was a disappointment.

While I think I would recommend this game, it also confuses me to a great degree. I am still confused by a plethora of choices and unsure how many achievements are meant to be found (and therefore how those endings or story pathways are able to be seen). Theoretically very interesting, though, I do love how you learn more about the story every time you play through it, you learn more about the world and the characters. It's really fascinating how you slowly uncover the big picture story behind everything in that way. I still feel like I don't know everything and I've been through it like 6 or 7 times!