Narcosis: A Walk Under the Waves?
Visuals 8/10: The man made structures were a bit plain, but it is an industrial zone, so plain is understandable. The oceanic creatures were well done and were very similar to real life sea creatures.
Audio 9/10: The music was eerie but not overpowering, lending a nice atmospheric feel of creepy to the game. The interview voice overs were well done, clear, and well placed in the game.
Control/Movement 9/10: The controls were basic and easy to master on a keyboard. The loss of peripheral vision makes play a bit difficult when moving and the thrusters can be a tad clunky to use during jump puzzles, but both help give the game a good feel of struggling to move in a half ton metal suit under miles of ocean.
Difficulty 7/10: The storyline was very linear, with no choice on what you could do other than one objective at a time. The puzzles were simple to master, even if they took some time. There is no difficulty setting that I could find, so you cannot make the game more or less difficult.
Replayability 7/10: With the linear storyline, there’s no way to really get lost in the game and find new things outside of spending more time looking for team mate’s personal items and bodies. While the game is fun to play, it’s not one that will make you want to play repeatedly because you can’t get enough.
Overall Score: 8.0/10
Have you ever wanted to wander the ocean floor? Deep down, where all the strange deep sea creatures flit about in complete blackness, the only lights from the bio luminescent creatures hunting for a possible bite to eat? Sounds fun, right? How about we add in a dive suit that’s essentially a mobile coffin, the underwater research and mining facility you work and live in has been destroyed and the only way to the surface is… across the ocean floor. Still interested in that walk?
If you are, Narcosis gives you that walk. Set in February 2019, deep in the ocean near Antarctica, you’re a diver trying to navigate your way to a way out of an earthquake-devastated underwater facility Oceanova and to the safety of the surface. Along the way, you encounter deadly spider crabs, face eating squid, cranky and hungry devilfish and the ever-looming threat of your sanity slipping away. Narcosis is a horror game with more of a psychological mind twisting, (think an Alfred Hitchcock movie), over jump scares and gore. You can die a few ways, but they’re manageable, if you keep your wits about you.
First we’ll touch on the mundane but you still should look at it things. I played the game on a PC, so the controls I had were your basic keyboard layout. You can also use a controller, there are adjustment settings for this. I did not use a controller. Keybinds are switchable, so if you’re used to a particular setup, this is great. I stuck with the standard that the game came with; WASD for movement, E to interact with objects, SPACE for the thrusters, TAB to view your event log, left mouse for the knife attack, (yes, you can defend yourself against some of the critters!) and right mouse for the flare. You can also adjust your visual graphics settings, everything from brightness to Vsync. There is also the ability to choose which monitor the game displays on, if you use two or more monitors. The sound is the usual, you can control both the master volume as well as music, voice overs and ambient sounds. The only gripe I have about the settings is the music is always very LOUD in these games, no matter how much I turn everything down. I’m probably too sensitive to the sound.
Now, for some game play. As previously mentioned, you’re a diver in a titanium suit, which is appropriately called “a walking coffin”. You never leave the suit. At all. Well, except for once in the poppy fields. So you’re in the suit 98% of the game. And the thing about the suit is you move SLOW. Plodding old mule down a dirt road slow. So there’s no running from stuff or to stuff, unless you use your thrusters, which give you a short burst of forward momentum. The other thing about the suit is you have limited peripheral vision. You can move your head side to side, but the suit will block some of your vision at all times. Your display for your oxygen, objective and flares is at the bottom of your helmet, so if you glance down, you can see the display. The suit itself is one of the major hindrances in the game; due to limited mobility and speed, one needs to time jumps, thruster boosts, maneuvering around giant spider crabs and through narrow tunnels and caves.
As you progress through the game, a man is giving an interview to a reporter about the industrial disaster you are currently trying to get out of. To me, the narrative gives a sense of hope or light at the end of the tunnel because the man is describing his experiences trying to get to the surface. So it’s like a thin thread of sanity to cling to while you navigate through a dark world, eerie music playing. Speaking of the music, it’s not obtrusive or overwhelming. It’s a constant noise in the background, the tempo and ambiance of it not creating an annoyance but more of a voice you hear as you cling to sanity. The music and voice overs are well done and don’t cause you to become distracted because you have a wooden voiced actor reading straight from the script. As time progresses, more parts of the interview start flowing in faster until you get to the end and well… you realize something. Shhh, Juli, no spoilers!
An interesting thing to point out in the game is the name and the dependence on oxygen to keep your sanity. Narcosis, or nitrogen narcosis, in diving is a state of altered consciousness due to a build up of certain gasses. The pressure of being so deep underwater causes a narcotic effect of most breathable gases. In Narcosis, you have to keep your oxygen tanks full via finding tanks laying around or tank fillers, or you will die. But before you die, or when you encounter a scary situation such as a squid attacking your helmet or finding one of your dead comrades that causes hyperventilation, your vision gets screwy and you start hallucinating. But the thing is, is the hallucinations can happen at any time in the game, low oxygen or not, especially when you get too close to the methane. You might be a losing it when you see one of these dudes hanging around:
A little tidbit of nonsense information about me is I am a bit of a marine biology nerd and my favorite place in the world is the Monterey Bay Aquarium. So something that really interested me about Narcosis is the fact that a lot of the sea bed and creatures are quite accurate. There is, of course, artistic license because it is a video game, but the familiarity of the creatures add a sense of ease that you won’t be hurt. Until a giant spider crab shoves its leg through your suit and you die a horrible, pressurized death. Or a squid decides your head is dinner under glass. You can defend yourself against some of the creatures, specifically the squid and the devilfish. The giant spider crabs are unkillable and will turn you into chum in a second flat, so they need to be avoided as best as you can. Here are a few screenshots of some of the sea critters:
The other visuals in the game are the man made structures. The structures, pipes, Compass 1 and 2 are fairly plain and industrial and look unpolished to me. There’s not a whole lot of minute detail to the man made objects or the human corpses in the game. The graphics aren’t bad at all, they’re very well-designed and put together, but they’re plain. Which is to be expected in a futuristic facility underwater. The funny thing I found was some papers and objects would be floating while others were firmly planted to desks and shelves. A massive earthquake just crumpled this facility into a barely working shell and someone’s family pictures are sitting perfectly on a desk. I found this amusing.
All in all, Narcosis is a fun, mind bending game. For me, it wasn’t too scary or intense, but it did have an edge of suspense. One of the things I wasn’t too keen on was the game has some puzzles, but not many. There are a few jumping puzzles and you need to search high and low for key cards, but there’s nothing too strenuous puzzle-wise. The hardest was finding a code in a rotating room. Narcosis is relatively short, I completed it in about four hours and it’s also very linear. You move from one objective to another, you don’t pile up objectives and have five different doors you could go through to get something done. So this linear progression leads to less wandering and poking around in places you probably shouldn’t.
One aspect of the game that could lead to a bit of lengthening of the play time is each team member is locatable, just as a corpse. When you find a corpse, you get an entry in your log, (the TAB button), for that person detailing their name, date of birth, nationality and job as well as a brief bio about them and how you found them. Each team member also has a personal object you can locate which details some more about them. I only found two items of the twenty possible to find. I also missed a few corpses.
While the game itself is not one that I would play repeatedly and become devoted to, it is one I would like to go back to when I’m in the mood for this genre of game. I am a completionist, so leaving items and bodies behind with an incomplete log will drive me nuts. While the game doesn’t warrant repeated play throughs on a regular basis, due to it being a linear storyline and it has no difficulty meter that I could find that allows you to raise or lower the difficulty, it would be fun to replay a few times, especially if you wish to complete the whole log.
Narcosis is a great, short horror game, something that can easily be played on a lazy Saturday afternoon. The writing and music composition help drive an immersive story about one man’s drive to survive in a hostile world he does not belong in. The realism of the ocean going creatures and the hostility of the environment help lend a sense of despair and familiarity to an otherwise unknown world. While I did not find the game overly scary, it does have an edge of tension that helps lead to some interesting shouting from me. (I took to yelling at the squids as I stabbed them when they attacked, saying if we were in a bar, they would be calamari and I’d be eating them. I know, I’m strange.)
Oh, two more things; tell the ghost I said hai and remember to smell the poppies.
I hope this review has been helpful and entertaining. I was given a Steam Narcosis key from Girl Streamers in exchange for my honest review. I was not compensated monetarily for my opinions, and all thoughts and opinions are my own and were not coached or given to me by Girl Streamers or Honor Code, the publisher and developer of Narcosis.
Screenshots from gameplay and are not of my own content. All images screenshotted are property of Honor Code games and Narcosis.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nitrogen_narcosis — source for information on nitrogen narcosis
http://www.narcosis-the-game.com/ — game website
