I just finished Submerged – I don’t exactly know where or how I got it, but it was in my Steam library and sounded interesting. I played around 3.5h and got 5 out of 10 Achievements, when I finished the main story, all that’s left would be some discovery and I’m not sure I want to do that.
Submerged is a third-person combat-free game in which you explore a mysterious flooded city.
So the exploration is nice, you move around on your boat, then scale buildings and find stuff, so far so good.
My main problem is while the game is not linear at all – you can go in any direction and each of the 10 things you need to find is progressing the story, but I don’t know why they thought it would be a good idea to teleport you back to your base when you found the thing, because this means you need to find all the hidden extras per building BEFORE you use the thing, which makes you needlessly backtrack. The game has a wonderful fast travel option back to base. Why not just a simple “do you want to fast travel back now? Y/N” instead of this?
You can also get some upgrades for your boat but it only enables you to use your speed boost for longer, and travel times are not a problem at all. So more like “find all of them for an achievement”. What would have helped is a sprint key while climbing, especially with the aforementioned backtracking. Also I find it very funny that the protagonist is a better climber than your toon in Assassin’s Creed, but you can’t jump over anything, even if it’s a a big step and if you are balancing across a plank you walk very slowly and awkwardly.
Graphics are fine for 2015, if somewhat repetitive, and hold up pretty well.
So much for the objective criticism, subjectively I didn’t like the story-telling in pictograms, I’m really bad with those, when I looked it up I only got like half of it. But it’s not really important, I guess.
Did I like the game? Yes and no. The problem is that it makes me want to play Assassin’s Creed now, and not their sequel, make of that what you want.
So, recommendation to buy it? No. Recommendation to play it when you get it in a bundle or something? Yes. It’s a short game, I don’t think you’d need more than 5h unless going for completion.
Ninja edit 2023-09-08: 100%ed it in an hour, finding most of the secrets on my own, grabbing a guide for the rest. Total time: 4.5h