![]() ![]() Not that I’m calling for an end to landmarks, mind on the contrary, anything that makes the oceanic wilderness of Diluvion less dull to look at is fine by me. I suppose the idea here is that the game gives you crutches once you’ve proved you can get around without them, but their presence feels like an unnecessary safety net, quashing the sense of adventure a proverbial ball of yarn, trailing behind you in even the furthest reaches of the sea. Diluvion’s use of landmarks seems sort of self-defeating, though they’re introduced as recognisable features of the underwater landscape that you can use to better pinpoint your position, but once you’ve visited one it also gets permanently added to the edges of your compass, letting you lazily home in on it from pretty much anywhere. I rather like it, to be honest we’ve gotten so used to minimaps and waypoints being a staple of open-world design that people seem to forget that finding your way home can be rewarding in itself. Your two best friends are your compass and your map of the area, the latter of which you won’t even have access to until you’ve managed to loot one from a seafarer’s sodden pack. ![]() Navigation plays a major role, and you certainly don’t have a dashboard of space-age positioning systems at your disposal. Controlling your sub is a right old doddle, which-depending on whether you’re the kind of person who likes to plant their face in the unending grittiness of the likes of Silent Hunter-is either a relief or a tremendous disappointment, but that doesn’t mean there’s no work involved in getting from A to B. Regardless, what you’re largely going to be doing is piloting. It all flows together very naturally, gating the world in such a way that mysteries lurk in the shadows beneath your feet, tantalisingly out of reach until you can get your hands on a hull that’s not thinner than the skin off an MRA’s nose. Oh yes, and once you take a peek down some of the more foreboding-looking crevasses, you’ll probably want to come back with some bigger guns, too. You’ll need a bigger boat-a goal that sounds all the more attractive after your first few scuffles with pirates-and you’ll need some idea of where to start looking. Except you can’t, because if you dive too far in that rust-bucket then it’ll be crushed under the mounting pressure like a Pepsi can ‘neath a troubled youth’s skate shoe. What I like about this setup is that it very clearly establishes both your long-term goal and the short-term goals that’ll lead to it. You are the captain of a scrappy little relatively-unthreatening vessel of unknown origins, and you’ve taken it upon yourself to find the legendary artefact said to have the mystical power to neatly clean up this whole pickle, hidden on the deepest, darkest part of the ocean floor. A tragedy of vaguely mythological note has flooded the world and sealed humanity beneath the waves with a roof of impenetrable ice, forcing those who survived this event to live out their lives in scattered underwater settlements of moderate-to-miserable condition. I mean, descended into Diluvion, a submarining adventure of exploration, navigation, crew management, and-when the need arises-ships firing lumps of scrap metal against one another until somebody springs a leak. It was with this mindset that I dived into. Sure, there aren’t as many exciting space monsters to blast out of the skies, but frankly most of the repulsive squishy things living on the ocean floor might as well be from another planet anyway, so what the heck, right? Everything’s a reasonable distance from everything else, there’s no hyperdrive to go wrong at a crucial moment, it’s always obvious which way is up, and nobody calls you out for dressing up like Napoleon Bonaparte while standing at the bridge. Now, the depths of the ocean, that’s the place to be all the crushing oppressiveness of a hazardous working environment with considerably more interesting rock formations to accidentally ram your prow into. The interstellar gulf stretches in all directions on an incomprehensible scale, and you can drift for a very long time indeed without bumping into so much as a double yellow line. It’s very big, as the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy once eloquently noted, but what the Guide failed to point out is just how much of it is empty. The chief problem that space simulations seem to struggle with, once you get things like controls and background art out of the way, is that it’s kind of difficult to make space exciting to explore. ![]()
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