![]() ![]() The sea is a gulf between them, a literal partition between the living and the dead.īetween the dolorous and the joyous is awe, and isolation-something Subnautica recently captured with its blend of exploration and survival. The boy's helical descent down keyhole-shaped halls feel as if he's caught in a whirlpool, the figures of father and son circling each other, unclear who is pursuing whom. In Rime, just as in Journey before it, the ocean is everywhere in coded flourishes. It's where we come from, the closest thing to god we can touch with our hands, but it can so easily destroy us. Yet with the same ecstatic colour palette, Rime reveals the Janus-faced nature of the sea: giver and taker of life. For all its kingdom-smothering depth it looks a shallow canvas, a giant wafting duvet fit for childlike adventure. Its flat-coloured azure looks as if it's been filled with a single click, the little white-capped waves giving way to seafoam like the lacing in a beer glass. The joy of The Wind Waker's sea, for instance, is the way it's so clearly crafted. To look at the ocean with that wonderful naivety is to explore it in new ways. Rockstar gave us watery negatives of its urban landscapes, with wrecks and secrets to explore below. Whether it be the blue expanse of Assassin's Creed Black Flag, to be de-fogged and checked off, or the picaresque playground of Sea of Thieves, host to a grog-sodden voyage of friendship and plunder. It's a glorious Ahabian conceit, the idea that the water is there to be conquered, and games are the perfect medium to express it - the player the centre of their own world, one to be mapped and completed. That's often what the ocean is in games: a hunting ground. All it was was a long dead whale, but it didn't matter it was Rockstar saying to its most intrepid fans, "We know where you dream, don't give up the hunt, anything is possible here." ![]() ![]() At first players thought it the remains of a sea monster. Laid out on the Los Santos sea floor were the bones of a leviathan, bursting from the earth like a clawing hand fossilised in its last drowning moments. With GTA 5, the submersible took us down into the void, to what felt like a shared marine subconscious. Is it any wonder that after years spent trawling the kerbstone shore of Rockstar's America, our volition dulled by straight roads and chartered wilds, that our imaginations fomented myths? Legends spread of Bigfoot prowling the pines, the Bermuda triangle lurking off the coast, haunted alleyways and ghost towns. Diving in Abzû's waters feel like being in this void anything could manifest down here if it could only be imagined. It's an ocean," says Alan Wake, aghast at the power and terrifying depth of his own imagination. ![]() Its ocean feels like the void space in which games are born: that vacuum from which all things are rendered. But its world is also an anti-place, an anti-design. Galaxies of colourful fish burst across the blue, devoured whole by sleek predators, ignored by cruising giants. Playing Abzû means inhabiting a place of abyssal beauty. Sea of Thieves' ocean is a marvelous thing, perhaps the most beautiful depiction there has been in games. But there is something else he found in the deep, something that speaks to the heart of the medium. Below the waves, Nava's persistent motifs of lone drifters and civilisations lost carry on their current ideas of conservation, and restoration. Like the books, poems, and films that precede them, games texture their seas with meaning. Is there any other medium as potent for probing this panic, putting a controller in our hands and dropping us in?Ĭertainly, in terms of physical exploration, games have empowered us while letting us stay dry on our sofas. Thalassophobes feel dread and fascination at the endless blue, the churning compulsion to glimpse below as the waterline laps against the lens, despite the primal fear it induces - don't look down, lest what's down looks up, and opens its jaws. With Abzû, the first game from his own studio Giant Squid, that's exactly where he took us: a pure deep-sea diving game of terror and wonder. To quote the mariner and mystic Herman Melville, Nava was "crazy to go to sea." Despite its desert setting, these flourishes betray an Ishmaelian compulsion. The game's art director, Matt Nava, seems transfixed by it. Later on it grows more vivid: those blue caverns, shoals of fabric scraps darting back and forth, the wanderer's robes undulating like submerged cloth. When you move, your body is a flying dream, each leap a shackle broken, drifting like a Chagall bride. The sun screes across the surface, glimmering in the silica and crushed quartz like lakes of blazing light. "It's always ourselves we find in the sea" - e e cummings ![]()
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