Title: Diluvion
Genre: Action, Adventure, Indie, RPG
Developer: Arachnid Games
Publisher: Gambitious Digital Entertainment
Release Date: Feb 2, 2017
Diluvion is a game about exploring the depths of the ocean in a Jules Verne-inspired world in rickety subs alongside crotchety sailors. The game is a sort of survival RPG that sees you traveling from hub to hub, meeting the remnants of a thinned out human race that’s been forced under the sea. There are no sprawling cities or worlds here, and all you are left with is broken ships and structures where humanity is fighting for space and air. No idea where all the air is coming from, but it’s a video game and I can cut it some slack.
Humanity in this underwater world looks like it’s one rivet away from becoming extinct.
The game sees you captain a very steampunk sub (you can access 9 subs through your journey) and simply explore this really interesting underwater world. Along the way you are going to loot structures, fight pirates, recruit sailors, upgrade your sub, do lots of trading and discover all sorts of wonders. Taken as a whole Diluvion is a bloody fantastic experience in a captivating world and I found myself lost in the game for hours on end.
The game itself has two distinct styles going on at once and that’s a bit jarring at first. The world is rendered in full 3D and every looks amazing. Your sub looks like it’s pulled straight from a steampunk novel and enemy vessels are also wild and diverse in looks and style. The hubs are all unique and this cool mishmash of broken ships and stations welded together. Humanity in this underwater world looks like it’s one rivet away from becoming extinct.
But the game changes everything when you zoom inside of ships or structures. Diluvion switches to a 2D format and while it’s a big change, it really works out for the best and helps give the RPG section of game its own style. It’s in this mode where you talk to your crew and others to move the story along (it’s pretty linear, but the game does have one) and where to handle ship and crew upgrades as well as exploration of locations.
You can hire crew with the loot your trade in and they will mill about your sub or help man stations you assign them to. Crew are varied and can all be upgraded with relics you find on your travels so you may just get attached to those you pick up. But these crew can also help when you are out exploring by risking their lives to explore some station that is falling apart, or while trying to calm down a crazed sailor that is between you and tons of potential loot.
Diluvion constantly asks you to weigh risk over reward and that is the one thing that makes the game so damn rewarding. I don’t usually like these sort of games but I found myself lost for hours in the world only to realize that I really hadn’t done all that much. That’s not a knock on the game, it’s just that I loved taking things slow and pacing my actions, making calculated choices. Will my air tanks last me if I explore over that next ridge? Does that ping from my sonar mean an enemy pirate or a much-needed merchant? If I loot this fallen sub will I get ambushed by pirates? It’s a very fun, yet tense experience.
Gameplay is much like any other survival game but maybe a little less involved than most which helps getting into the game easer. It doesn’t make exploring easier mind you, but understanding the game is a fun and simple affair. Your sub has weapons and will need ammo that you collect or trade for. This comes in the form of scrap metal and if you run out you are essentially dead in the water unless you have some torpedoes which are expensive and rare. Every single shot you take counts and as you are dealing with balls of junk flying through water you are going to miss unless you are bearing down pretty close on enemies.
Your gunner can be upgraded and you can add an additional crew to buff things like power and accuracy, but early on battles are both tense and brutal. When you see another sub slide into view your heart may just start racing, especially as repair kits are few and require the right crew or a nearby station. That said the AI can be pretty stupid as I’ve seen some tougher subs kill themselves by piloting straight into mines. Still, that is sometimes a boon as it has saved my skin on more than one occasion.
The other two major bits to worry about are food and air. Air tanks can be a real bother as they can only be replenished at hub stations or a single time at wrecks and abandoned stations you find along the way. This makes the game really scary as I figured I would be fin backtracking to some pods only to find that I had sucked all the air and I was dead in the water. Diluvion really forces you to manage everything, but it doesn’t feel like a chore like so many survival games.
Food isn’t a big problem at first as you can buy it at stations and goes down slowly, but as your crew grows the rate at which you burn through it increases. I tend to hate survival games because there is simply too much to manage that it becomes a chore and ends up overshadowing any of the fun, but Diluvion manages to address this and makes it fun instead of a chore. Yes, you are going to be running short and end up dying a bunch, but you will still get time to actually play the game and explore, and not just survive.
All that said Diluvion still has some issues that keep it from being great. It address a lot of the issues I have with games of this nature and I spent hours sucked into the adventure, but some basic things are simply lacking. Controls are a little complicated and finicky to grasp with the mouse and keyboard combo making combat a messy experience. Your sub just doesn’t control how you expect/want it to. The third-person perspective makes controlling and targeting just feel a bit imprecise.
You also are going to lose hours of work because of the strange save system that is going to drive you utterly mad. Diluvion uses a checkpoint system like most games of this nature that you can plan around. You find these major hub networks and locations and you work our way from one to the other while exploring in-between. Being as you can’t save whenever you want it adds to the tension of the experience and makes your planning essential, but they don’t always work like you want.
The game marks save points with schools of green fish which are easy to see and also let you know you are someplace the game deems important. But the game is really picky and after hiring crew, upgrading your ship or after making a big discovery the game wont save even if it says it does on-screen. I played for nearly an hour and hit several checkpoints (the game acknowledged them), but when I died and loaded the last checkpoint I was sent back to the Ice Palace that was over an hour of work prior. It was a maddening experience.
Death sucks and I’m glad that it isn’t permanent, but losing hours of progress when you shouldn’t is a real pain. I’m working from a review build of the game so maybe this has been addressed for tomorrow’s launch of the game, but it’s something that happened more than once and hurt the game.
Diluvion is still a good little game that does so much right, but just feels like it needed a little more time in the oven to cook. For all the amazing style it oozes it just lacks that little bit of final polish it needs to be great. That said the issues it has could easily be addressed in a patch or two and they don’t keep Diluvion from still being a solid gaming experience.
3.5/5
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