[Review] Diluvion

[R e i]

 

Diluvion is in that most tragic class of disappointing game: the kind with great ideas. There's so much to love and appreciate on the surface that the game's profound awkwardness and convoluted mechanics just hurt to experience. It presents an unusual take on a post-apocalyptic society where humanity doesn't go to space or live in the nuclear wastes. Instead, they're forced to build civilization anew underwater, with steampunk-inspired submarines and habitats as their only means of shelter. Humanity's only hope of breaking through the oppressive ice above is a godlike ancient artifact lying at the bottom of the ocean. As the captain of your own tiny vessel, you are tasked with recruiting a capable crew, building a ship strong enough to withstand the crushing ocean depths, and locating the powerful artifact before anyone else. As you creep your way to the bottom of the ocean, you'll often have a checklist of parts to grab, people to see, and enhancements to make. Much of your journey is spent scavenging supplies and key items in uncharted danger zones infested with landmines and sea creatures--and it's hard not to be affected by seeing how many other vessels tried and failed to infiltrate the same areas. One of the more chilling commonalities along the way is finding merchants who were stranded in isolated areas, waiting for someone to come along to give them the jump they needed to escape.Diluvion is a perfect example of how a video game can get so much right, only to be almost wrecked by one or two critical flaws.  In Diluvion’s case, these flaws are baffling, because they could have easily been foreseen and fixed with some proper testing.  Instead, they weren’t, turning Diluvion into a huge missed opportunity – one that despite its beauty and atmosphere will probably leave you with mixed feelings when all is said and done.  It is an ambitious title that has a lot going for it, so it isn’t hard to recommend.   If you dive into it though, you should do it with the knowledge that it may stretch your tolerance for bad game design to the breaking point.Diluvion takes place after a great cataclysm has doomed civilization to an undersea existence.  What remains of humanity now lives in the ocean, under a thick sheet of ice that covers the entire world.  You, as the newly minted captain of a submarine, take on the quest to find a great artifact that may restore mankind to its former glory.  During your journey, you visit various locales like magnificent natural formations, huge sunken wreckages, trading posts, and cities.  As you progress, you find all kinds of hidden treasures as you defend yourselves from a variety of dangerous foes. If you boil Diluvion down to its basic elements, it plays a lot like a space sim, but underwater, where everything moves very slowly.  Like a space sim, you have two basic attacks.  The first is a basic, short range, low accuracy attack that shoots scrap metal at enemies.  The second is the torpedo, a guided underwater missile that locks onto enemies with devastating effect.   Although these mechanics may seem familiar, they will take some getting used to if you haven’t played a submarine game before.  In Diluvion, everything, both you and your enemies, moves slowly.  Your submarine has a lot of inertia, it turns slowly, and it generally isn’t capable of outrunning anyone.  You also have virtually no way of evading attacks if somebody has you dead-to-rights; if you get too close to an overpowering enemy it will destroy your ship before you can escape.  It feels very much like you are piloting an underwater behemoth in the game, which seems to be precisely what Diluvion is aiming for.  Fighting enemies can be a rough challenge, one that will likely end in your death until you have grasped the game's controls.  The game benefits from this sense of danger in the end, because it forces you to be cautious and smart about how you use your resources.  The combat works well and is appropriate for what the game is supposed to be, but this doesn’t always make it enjoyable.  There isn’t much of a variety in the tactics that you can use to defeat enemies – you usually just aim at an enemy and spam them as much as possible with rapid fire and torpedoes.  Or, if necessary, you keep your distance and just spam them with torpedoes while shooting the ones that they launch at you.  There is a terrific leviathan boss battle at the end of each act that provides a change of pace.  The combat in the game is otherwise fairly repetitive.

 

 

Thankfully, Diluvion isn't always fear and dread. The journey's gentle pace leads you to treasure every new landmark you come across--many awe-inspiring in either scale or design. Towns are elaborate wonders of construction. Most checkpoints are man-made structures overtaken by ice or algae. Diluvion's most notable accomplishment is its score, a beaut symphony that haunts every mile you journey in-game, accentuating the wonder in one scene, ratcheting up the tension in another. The more shallow sections of ocean are bright, wondrous places that you can find yourself wandering around aimlessly with a sense of peace and calm. The ancillary, narrative experience of Diluvion is a fine one. It's the act of actually having to play the game that causes the whole thing to dissolve. Interacting with other characters takes on a lighter tone, with the view switching from the artfully rendered 3D ocean to 2D when docking at towns or with other subs. There's an element of repetition here, since many of the stock NPCs are copy-pasted throughout the entire game, and most of them are interactive only to issue random grunts and sighs. The ones who do talk, however, speak in snappy, often funny lines of dialogue, with more than few characters worthy of endearing themselves over time--especially your erstwhile crew, who will interact not just with their captain but with each other when they're docked. The relationships tend to fall by the wayside as exploration ramps up, but it's always welcome when the game takes a breath and allows your helmsman to give the history of a new area or lets your crazy gunner talk rings around the submissive sonar expert. The ancillary, narrative experience of Diluvion is a fine one. It's the act of actually having to play the game that causes the whole thing to dissolve. Diluvion is marred by unintuitive controls and one of the most needlessly convoluted user interfaces in recent memory. This is a problem that truly shows its ugly face when your sub is forced into a fight. Your attack options are limited to begin with: you can fire shrapnel--or later on, homing torpedoes--at your enemies, and maneuver slowly around them. That's about the extent of your tactics, and in practice, most naval battles in the game resemble less Assassin's Creed: Black Flag than a toddler crashing two submarine toys against each other going “pew-pew!” before eventually deciding one of them gets to win. When you're not fighting, you're exploring.

 

 

You'll get a constant, easy-to-follow list of tasks for every mission, most of which just revolve around traveling to an unknown area and scanning for a particular type of resource. Errand-running aside, the game completely flounders when it comes to the actual act of navigating Diluvion's vast ocean. There is an in-game map that doesn’t actually show the player's location relative to any of the landmarks they've visited. Your waypoint function is a school of golden fish who come to help only when they feel like it and often swim through walls--something you cannot do. Checkpoints are frequently miles away from where you've traveled, and running out of air during the journey back is something that occurs frequently until you invest the hefty funds required to buy a new air tank. Occasionally, even if you are able to reach a specific location, the game has a nasty habit of not telling you that you need to hear a specific conversation before a particular event is actually triggered. For every one fresh, intriguing, and delightful element Diluvion brings to the table, the act of getting to experience any of it is an exercise in frustration. These are the problems that plague Diluvion, and far too often, the persistent state of your sub is “hopelessly lost.” The game tries to make you do some actual navigational heavy lifting, which is admirable, but you're stuck with a limited pool of resources (like air and food for the crew) that restrict how long you can spend out in the unknown before desperately needing to refuel. And therein lies the true tragedy of Diluvion. For every one fresh, intriguing, and delightful element it brings to the table, the act of getting to experience any of it is an exercise in frustration. And while the story answers the questions posed at the outset, more often than not those answers aren’t worth the Sisyphean effort it takes to find them.

 

 

Boss fights are well conceived, but once the initial shock of many of the creature designs fades away, you're left with the fact that all these problems multiply in the face of larger enemies. More powerful gun upgrades help later, but combat in general is a slapdash affair that builds dread for the wrong reasons.Combat isn’t the main attraction for Diluvion though.  Where this game really shines is with its brilliant art direction and gorgeous, exotic visuals.  The game boasts of being inspired by Jules Verne, and it hits that mark perfectly with its combination of steampunk design and alien scenery.  Despite the its post-apocalytpic premise, the game's world is a charming one.  It is a distant future world where 1930s submarine technology fits right in.   Attention to detail is impressive, like the little streams of bubbles that come from your ship when you change elevations.  Your ship looks particularly inspired, especially towards the end of the game when you have fully decked it out with upgrades.  What will probably blow you away though is the variety of bright, colorful environments that the world has for you to discover.  Diluvion is a gorgeous game with a huge world for you to explore – one that is delightfully free of copy-and-paste and full of one breath-taking vista after another.  Much of the game takes place deep underwater with no natural light, but there is plenty of glowing marine life and brightly lit machinery to make up for it in most spots.  The best example of this dynamic at work is the old sewer pipe system that you find about halfway through the game – a colorful network of tunnels with some jaw-dropping visuals.  It is because of the beautiful scenery that the game maintains its sense of exploration and adventure throughout its 20-hour run length.  How could anyone not want to be a submarine captain and explore this world? The atmosphere in the game is aided by some terrific audio when it comes to both music and sound effects.  The music that plays while you are peacefully exploring is lovely, and the battle music is appropriately exciting (albeit repetitive as the combat itself).  The sound effects are a perfectly chosen blend of classic submarine noises like muffled underwater explosions, sonar pings, the “whoosh!” of the torpedoes as they are fired, and random creaks and groans.  Suffice it to say, the strength of Diluvion lies in its presentation.To make matters worse, the game has a map, but it doesn’t actually mark your location on that map.  (Why doesn’t my submarine have a stupid navigator?).  Since you are underwater, it is very easy to get disoriented and lose sense of where you are or where you are supposed to be going – something that happens frequently when you get attacked or something else diverts you from your mission.  To make matters even worse, your crew slowly consumes oxygen while you are travelling, which means that you must find some way to replenish your air periodically.  Your exploration sessions are frequently cut short by the need to circle back to base so that your crew doesn’t suffocate to death, a round trip that may take you ten or more minutes.  Sometimes, you explore so far away from oxygen sources that you die and you have to revert back to your last checkpoint, which could have been 20 minutes ago.  The air supply mechanic makes perfect sense within the game and it adds a welcome element of survival and challenge.  However, it accentuates the major problems that the game has with its lack of directions and quest markers.  It is a shame that the game so frequently bogs down in these quagmires. The game’s tendency to bog down in long, boring searches is its biggest problem, but it has some other minor issues as well.  The game is very sloppy in some other areas, particularly its dialog and storytelling.  The game frequently references the world’s back story as if expecting you to know all of it, but it never actually lays out that back story in a codex or a dialog dump.   There appears to have been a rich world conceptualized for this game, but for some reason an explanation of that world is sorely missing from the game.  NPCs are mostly signposts who issue one or two lines of generic dialog, with the exception of important story NPCs who might have four or five lines of dialog that don’t always make sense.   There is barely any explanation given to you for why you need to fulfill each of your quests, and by the end of the game there is a good chance that you will have forgotten why you started off on your adventure in the first place.  The end comes kind of suddenly, with a final scene that might leave you scratching your head.  It feels as if a more ambitious story existed at one time, but chunks of it were cut out of it to make the game’s release date.