Welcome to another YvoCaro Plays!
As always, these blurbs are mainly about the video games I’m currently playing. Unedited thoughts spring up in my mind, mostly game-related, sometimes not. Or a random train of thoughts starting with the game and ending somewhere completely different!
If you like these bits of gaming thoughts, you can find the previous ones here.
Life is the Bubbles
While writing this there’s a tune in my head with the distinctive voice of Sebastian from the original Little Mermaid telling the tale:
“Under the sea
Nobody beat us
Fry us and eat us
In fricassee
We what the land folks loves to cook
Under the sea we off the hook
We got no troubles
Life is the bubbles
Under the sea”
Yes, I’ve caught the diving bug! In the virtual world, mind you. I don’t see myself jumping in with the fishies in real life. But I’m having a blast in my diving games. Plural!
You may have seen that I reviewed Endless Ocean Luminous this week and that I wrote that it was my first-ever diving game. And it was! Since then, however, I’ve been going on a diving binge.
The Rating for Endless Ocean Luminous
Endless Ocean Luminous received very mixed reviews since its release. NintendoLife gave it a 5 out of 10, IGN gave it a 4 out of 10 and Gamespot even a 3 out of 10. Some gave higher grades, such as God is a Geek, who gave 8 out of 10. Most critics stayed somewhere in the middle ground. So I was in good company in the middle with my I Like It, which translates to a 7.
All while writing my review, I hesitated between giving the higher score of I Like it a Lot, but ultimately I opted for my final choice. The reason for this was that the Story Mode should have been better and made scanning of fish feel grindy.
Since the review, I’ve focussed on Shared Dives instead. There’s something so special to work on exploring the biome with strangers from all over the world. Imagine they are sitting at home (or on the bus or anywhere really) just like me, in whatever country they live, enjoying the same things I see. There’s something magical in that!
Most of the time, the other divers are much quicker than I am discovering the fish with the strange biometric readings and the UML, but that doesn’t matter. I’m enjoying it anyway, and once the map is explored for more than 80%, I can jot down the biome’s ID and visit it again in a solo dive. Take it easy and enjoy the sights!
More Diving Games
To continue my hunger for diving and to see how other games tackled it, I downloaded two more. For comparison! I went for Beyond Blue, which James reviewed on LadiesGamers some time ago. And for Abzû by the developers behind Flower and Journey. I was very tempted by Subnautica, too, but I decided against it as it’s first person. I don’t want to trigger my gaming sickness on top of my sea sickness.
Beyond Blue
Beyond Blue looks very good, too, and it focuses on the educational part. There is a storyline, but it’s a bit thin. You play as Mirai, following her on her adventures, observing a family of sperm whales, one of which has recently given birth to a calf. The game strives to bring home how the ocean is suffering from the way we treat the environment. But it’s not all about the whales. You also get to observe various other wonders of the ocean.
I think the big difference with Endless Ocean Luminous is that you get small tasks every dive. Like checking out playing young dolphins and scanning them. Taking samples from the corals or installing transmitters. While diving, you regularly chat with your underwater team about the mission, which is presented in full English voice acting.
Between these assignments, you can, of course, just swim about and scan everything you come across. Between dives, you automatically go to your futuristic-looking submarine, from where you can call home to progress the background story. You can also check the things you scanned in your database to admire later back at base. And very impressive, you can watch actual documentary footage, courtesy of the partnership with the BBC, makers of the documentary series Blue Planet.
Though it sounds as if Beyond Blue offers more in the way of gameplay than Endless Ocean Luminous does, I enjoy the latter more. It’s much easier to enjoy the surroundings and just relax. In Beyond Blue, I felt the need to constantly strive for the next task to see what would unlock next. The scanning wasn’t as fluid, and the control felt a bit unwieldy.
Abzû
Like in Endless Ocean Luminous, it’s just you and the ocean. The world underwater looks more stylized, but the atmosphere creates it in a unique way. The majority of your time in Abzû is spent swimming around and exploring every nook and cranny in an area. The game doesn’t show it all at once: the mystery slowly unfolds as you find the right thing to trigger the next plot sequence. The game’s story is very subtle and sometimes feels like you just stumble upon it.
You can take a step back by going into meditation mode. Your view shifts to first person, and you can take in the sights and see all the marine life going its way around you. Abzû can definitely be a more Zen-like experience with moments of wonder.
Although Abzû is a very unique and special experience it was marred for me by the controls. I read somewhere that swimming in the game is so easy and intuitive…my intuition must not have been in tune then, as I had the hardest time.
Endless Ocean Luminous On My Mind
Maybe it’s just because it was my first experience swimming with the fishies, but all the while trying out Beyond Blue and Abzû, I wanted to go back. Back to Endless Ocean Luminous and to my solo dive, where I was painstakingly mapping out the ocean floor until I could scan the UML.
That’s surely saying something when a game occupies my gaming thoughts!
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