Uppercut Games has presented Submerged as an exploration game sans combat. You play as Miku, a young girl who must steer a small boat around a flooded post-apocalyptic city in search of large buildings to scale and scavenge supplies from. She needs these supplies to save the life of her moribund brother, Taku. You can collect them in any order you want, as the next supply crate you discover is always conveniently stocked with the supplies Taku requires at any given time. You can also gather these provisions at whatever pace suits you, motoring around the city to see what’s out there.

Trouble is, what’s out there, while certainly not nothing, isn’t a whole lot of somethings, either. Within the first half an hour of playing you’ll have upgraded your boat, located some supplies, scaled a building, found clues as to what happened to the city, spotted someone watching you and gotten a peek into Taku and Miku’s simple but touching backstory. It’s an intriguing setup for an exploration game, but, sadly, Submerged never builds to anything beyond that.

Submerged Review

Here’s what I liked:

Sob story — Miku and Taku haven’t had an easy go of things, but I suppose that’s par for the course when the “course” is a worldwide water hazard in which Team Civilization has disappeared from the scorecard. Their tale is told through simple pictures meant to be drawings by the siblings that unlock each time Miku delivers fresh supplies to Taku. You’ll slowly learn the tragic happenings of their once-happy family that led the pair to the game’s desolate city with Taku clinging to life.

Scraping the sky — Conveniently, the former residents of the city have left behind the precise supplies Taku needs to survive. Inconveniently, they’ve left them at or near the tops of the tallest buildings in town. This turns things the quest for supplies into an Assassin’s Creed-like platforming challenge. As a young and exhausted girl, you don’t have the type of move set at your disposal that Ubisoft’s assassins do, so you have to make do with your basic ladder and vine climbing and by shimmying across precarious ledges. In fact, you can’t even sprint, and jumping is only available via pressing up on the left stick in specific contexts. Still, climbing up really tall buildings that overlook pretty, if destroyed, landscapes is always an enjoyable undertaking. The climb to the top isn’t always straightforward, and secrets are stashed in out-of-the-way locations, forcing you to think about where you’re climbing and why.


Here’s what I didn’t like:

Back to the well — There isn’t a whole lot to do in Submerged. There are 10 buildings to find with your telescope, and those buildings need to be climbed and the cargo at the top collected. That and that alone is the main quest. Yes, once you collect the supplies you bring them back and use them on Taku, but that stuff triggers automatically and happens inside cut-scenes. Uppercut never introduces anything new to the formula of zipping your boat around the map, spinning the telescope around for a point of interest and climbing up said point to acquire whatever item of interest resides there. There are 26 optional upgrades to collect, but they all do the exact same thing (extend the amount of time your boat can travel at top speed). There are also a few sea creatures to spot and optional story panels about the city’s demise to collect. It’s nice that there is something else to do in Submerged, but these tasks follow in the main quest’s wake in that they do not vary from one to the next. And while the unlocked panels are nice, they alone are not enough to motivate you to drag yourself out of your boat and perform the same climbing actions for the umpteenth time to snag them. There is no intrinsic gameplay reward here, and that’s a problem.

Something in the water — It won’t be long before you notice that there are some sort of diseased beings wandering around the city, always watching you but never getting close enough to make contact with you. This seems intriguing at first. Indeed, it does lead to a nice little scene at the end of the game, but it goes absolutely nowhere during the game itself. They’re there. They’re following you. They’re watching you. You think they’re coming for you. They don’t come for you. The game ends, and they show up in a cut-scene. You can’t string your audience along like that with glimpses of some creepy beings that never build to any sort of crescendo. Well, you can, apparently, but you shouldn’t. Uppercut didn’t want to put any combat into Submerged, and that’s perfectly fine. But other studios have avoided putting violence into their games and still managed to keep the player invested in the experience and worried about what might happen next. Uppercut has not.

Wind sleeper — Way back in 2002 Nintendo tried something different with its venerated Legend of Zelda franchise: it put Link the hero in a boat in a cartoon world. Wind Waker surprised many a skeptical fan with visuals and game design that are among the best in the franchise. One universal complaint, though, was that there was too much ocean and too few things to do in it. I’ve already outlined how Uppercut has made a similar mistake with Submerged, but the indie studio has taken things one step further by putting players to sleep with a single musical track. There’s nothing wrong with the music that’s been included. It isn’t memorable or exciting, but it serves its purpose as background noise. Unfortunately, as with the rest of the game’s components, there is no variety to this noise. When you’re putt-putting around for half an hour searching for supply crate seven or eight, you may hit the wall like I did. No longer playing for any reason other than to give Submerged a fair and complete review, I turned off the noise and turned on Spotify to keep myself awake while searching for the last few caches.

Submerged Xbox One Review

Wrap-up:

Virtually everything that occurs after Submerged’s first half an hour is a copy pasta job of those opening minutes. Worse, as you approach the endgame, the search for the next batch of supplies typically grows into an ever-longer and more tiresome slog across the city’s sunken streets. This will leave you scratching your head as to where the next crate is located and as to why Uppercut didn’t give you some more compelling reasons to keep navigating the city’s waterways.

Score: Skip It

Submerged was developed by Uppercut Games on Xbox One. It was released on August 7, 2015 for $19.99. A copy was provided by Uppercut Games for review purposes.