Recent reviews by Vegastar

This is a fun little game about diving in the ocean, exploring the depths, then savagely murdering every creature in sight as a sacrifice to the gods of capitalism.

The atmosphere is quite nice, characters and creatures are done in a pretty good looking pixel art format, the soundtrack is quite pleasant and generally fits the themes and moods. There’s plenty of little mini games, events and gameplay variety to keep things fresh beyond the loop of ‘jump in, kill fish, make money’ and overall I found the game engaging all the way through until the end of the early access chapters. Just about every cutscene is worth watching at least once - they’re incredibly stylish and good for a chuckle.

The game makes a big deal about using procgen environments and that “every dive is different” but I honestly didn’t see much of that. Creature spawns are more or less static and the areas themselves rarely change their layout beyond small, superficial things. It doesn’t really take away much from the gameplay loop itself, and I probably wouldn’t have even thought about it if the game didn’t make such a big show about calling it out in the first place.

My biggest complaint is the controls. They’re quite clunky, to the point that I’d say the #1 cause of dying for the time I played this was due to some kind of control mishap. It baffles me a bit that in a game about being underwater and more or less free from the idea of gravity that your aim is locked in to +/- 45 degrees horizontally with no way to aim any higher or lower without awkwardly repositioning poor Dave in the midst of having his butt chomped off by an angry shark. The choice to require a button press to begin aiming the weapon with a totally separate button to actually fire, neither of which is terribly responsive, can be equally frustrating in more dangerous moments.

Adding to that frustration is dying during a boss fight/event section commits the mortal sin of making you rewatch all the unskippable cutscenes/intros every single time you restart it - please, a skip button. I beg you.

I do hope the world generation and control issues get polished up before the game releases, but even if they don’t this is still worth a play if you’re in to the vaguely roguelite gameplay loop and exploration stuff.

A very nice upgrade for a classic PC title.