Playing With Soul!

Discover new #indiegame demos every week on #JMTMPlayingWithSoul.
In the darkest underwater corners where only light will guide you to the surface, the atmospheric platformer #SAMUDRA by @Khayalan_arts, still in development, but set to release this year is not a game you'd want to miss.

"There is no such thing as ‘away’, when we throw anything away, it must go somewhere. - Annie Leonard"

Heavily influenced by the experience Khayalan Arts has in the Indonesian circle of NGO, against Ocean pollution, there is a both heartwarming and heartbreaking message that they hope would reach out to as many of us through the game, a message about the consequences from our negligible interest for solving an issue, or trying to get better at solving it, that's impacting the future of nature and therefore our own, because nature can live without us, but we cannot live without nature.
Khalayan Arts, formed up in 2019 in Jakarta, is a team not only of developers but of storytellers as well, and they really emphasize on that, because story-telling is what they do! Part of their activities has always been connected to story-telling via art, music and comic classes or through artistic exhibitions they actively take part in. Khayalan Arts has also attended to public 'Plastic Pollution Themed Art" installations twice since the indie company has been founded. They are proactively infusing meaningful messages to their posts on social media that can also relate to the game they are working on. Khayalan Arts is dedicated to creating games they find close to their heart and passion, experiences like some of the best atmospheric adventure puzzle games like Journey, Limbo, Inside, Little Nightmares, Gris and others.

Samudra is a storytelling sidescroller with puzzle & action elements focusing our attention on the effects of the pollution in a post-apocalyptic planet.
There's no dialogue in the game, and the first thing you'd wonder would be how come the game is 'storytelling' without a dialogue or any texts?
The developers of the game were clearly not lacking with ideas! Samudra is following up its events & story-telling so smoothly that you don't need any dialogue and text to understand or fully immerse yourself into it. Just give in and let the ocean current take you on a semi-realistic journey with fantasy twists.
Samudra is so good at building up the atmosphere that you will be filled with fear, with joy, anger or sadness through different courses of the game making the experience truly unique and heartwarming, all in a very measured dose. Designed and inspired as a reflection of real life experiences Samudra combines the surreal with the existent to form the perfect symbiosis in the gaming world. After all we haven't advanced yet to allow one person drop to the very deepest bottom of the ocean to uncover all the unknown secrets that might be lying there.
Speaking of which, if you haven't noticed the character designs in Samudra you better open your eyes! There is something very retro not only in the vibe and gameplay style of the game, but also in the character designs. While creatures can take any shapes and colors, the humanoids bring memories of these old-school side-scrolling games you'd play as a kid and bear in your heart until you part...among other things. Take for example one of the enemies you can discover in the factory areas, the "Salaryman" who is a tall individual wearing a formal suit, with a red tie, suitcase and a watch he is looking at constantly when idle. There's is one thing in common every humanoid has, including you, the player, and that's the classic underwater snorkel helmet. Or take for instance your own clothing, a classic striped blouse usually characterizing sailor clothes! It's not common to see such characters in modern gaming, and a lot of retro inspired characters look as if they were taken out from one of those back in the day famous cartoons. Definitely a big plus for the direction the developers have taken with the memorable and distinctive character designs.

The developers have also picked a name that brings a lot of meaning behind the idea of the game. Sa.mu.dra is a Sanskrit term, an Indo-Aryan language, primary liturgical language of Hinduism and the predominant language of most works of Hindu philosophy as well as some of the principal texts of Buddhism and Jainism (language source information: Wikipedia). Half of the word means water, and the other half means 'merging' or 'fusion', for example confluence of two rivers = the merging of two rivers, or by the game terms 'merging of waters', 'water fusion', 'water gathering', or 'gathering together of waters' (saṃ- "together" & udra- "water").

Through your journey you're accompanied only with the basic movement keys, and icons that serve more as a way to remind you that you can interact with the environment - jump a gap, trigger a cutscene or interact with a creature. This mechanic is proving essential for the progression of the game.
You might find yourself entering a very dark cave and this mechanic would remind you to search for a light source you could use to light the path and continue your journey. After that it's your turn to use your imagination and discover what you could be using. In other situations you'd have to use the pollution to your advantage, moving junk, like a washing machine to use as a platform to help you reach a tire sitting above you, that you can push to clear out the way infront of you and once again help you move forward. This is not the only way developers decided to communicate with you within the game - speaking of story-development you can find different drawings on the walls, presumably drawn by somebody that will definitely make more sense as we progress further in the game. These small hints add-up to the atmosphere, and make passing through a dark cave more interesting, building the sense in you that there's something happening here, that there is a meaning behind it, more than just platforming and passing through a certain area.

With it's simplistic and stunningly beautiful artistic style, you're in for a retro inspired dive you'd want to never end. There's piles of rubbish on the bottom of the ocean colliding with the serenity the calming underwater setting is embracing. As soon as you get to land on the surface for the very first time you're overrun with the thrill of mystery and exploration, and at Khayalan Arts they mean it. The beautiful & delicate sounds of the ocean in the background, also present in the stunning soundtrack themes, is creating a soothing and relaxing experience until suddenly something dramatic happens and the entire mood of the game shifts. There's all one could ask for in a game!
Although the demo reveals the level design looks linear there's many layers within it, because the game is filled with collectibles, easter eggs and mystery, and only the way the story envelopes and builds up is satisfying enough to never make you think about how long or straight-forward the game could actually be.
The demo offers around twenty minutes of gameplay for the fast and furious, from artistically stunning open areas, to tight tactical stealth and chase sections, hidden areas with secrets, easy to solve puzzles and even something similar to quicktime events. The side-scrolling genre offers many ways to play around and expand a certain world, and it would be interesting to discover what else the full-fledged experience offers.
Speaking of mysteries Samudra also seems to have it's own signature mascots, the so called Sea Bunnies that usually help you find the right path, but more about them further in the thread.

As any eco system, the ocean in Samudra is filled with all kinds of epic looking deep-sea life forms, including the first encounter in the game that's really standing out, and hopefully we get to cherish more such moments further on, the giant Anglerfish, that's capable of making you crawl in fear or gasp in awe not knowing what to expect further in the game, or the huge schools of jellyfish....oh wait....these are not jellyfish...it's...plastic...plastic bags...floating in the water....resembling jellyfish from the distance!
Apart from the obvious human activity, the littering, there's a different kind of human activity that's taking advantage on the bottom of the ocean you get to experience first hand through the demo. Giant underwater factories guarded by machinery are abusing what's left of the once beautiful ecosystem and for sure contributing with more pollution to the environment.
There's not much information yet about what these factories might be up to, but it's obvious they've been inspired by real life human activities that shape up the exact same way, leeching from the resources of the planet, corroding everything around them.
Discovering there's an area where the Sea Bunnies are actually leading you to the source that they seem to want to escape from, where they get squished into pink juice substance, is enough to show you that instead embracing the environment we find a way to squeeze everything we can until it parishes completely.
We are masters of destruction. We don't try to improve our old methods with eco-friendly alternatives, to try to live in a better harmony with nature, to find a solution to living in our own self-invented world without harming the rest of that world, instead we're more likely to search for a new planet to inhabit after we destroy our own, instead take care of what we can't live without. The world in Samudra has already past this stage, unfortunately for the worse outcome.
Eventually nature always wins, because nature can live without us, but we cannot live without nature, without everything essential for our survival - water, air, the sun, plants, and other life forms in general that we depend on. There's practically nothing in nature that can depend on us, except pollution, because all different life forms can adapt if we're not around them and continue their cycle. Unfortunately If we poison the world we live in, it'll poison the other life on it and the world we cannot live without, and then the circle of life will begin, because we will consume the poison we've released and this will slowly destroy us. Nature has it's ways, whether it's going to be an earhtquake, a tornado, erupting volcanoes, tsunamis, pollution consequences, new strains of viruses or a contagious disease or all together. There is life all around us, we are consisted of life, every living cell within another cell...we can't keep ignoring it.

It was shockingly breathtaking seeing how well Samudra manages to show off how the pollution merges with the natural environment. It has soaked in so deeply into the post-apocalyptic world that you're not capable of seeing the difference between jellyfish and plastic bags floating into the water from afar in one of the cinematics in the demo! You feel like this plastic has always belonged there! It makes you feel like you might have landed on a different planet, where the local fauna and flora is made up of bottles, trashed objects and plastic bags, a planet that has been beaten up and torn from everything that's been thrown at it, literally though. Samudra is a true representative masterpeace!

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