Review: Real Deep Sea Pressure in SHINSEKAI: INTO THE DEPTHS

The ocean has been a great source of mystery and desperation forever, and in the last few years, the great depths have been explored a lot more in video games. Shinsekai: Into The Depths continues to deliver a great journey into the deep seas like other games with various dangers, challenges, and unique gameplay elements. It may suffer from some difficult controls at first and some odd pacing, but it pays the players back with a massive map to explore, various tools and different things to do.

One of the first things players will notice will be the visual design in general. The high textures and more realistic aesthetic looks really good for the most part, but it also hits that uncanny valley in certain shots making it look really weird or bad at times. Shinsekai does, however, keep a very consistent atmosphere and feel through the whole game. Be it finding a robot friend while fighting giant sea bugs, exploring and mining for materials, or piloting an alien submarine, players will enjoy a lot in their searches of the deep sea with this wonderfully surreal environment. 

What stood out most to me was the overall very realistic feeling of being in the water. Most games allow you to run, swim, or shoot in the water pretty effectively. But this game has you walk slow, float, and flip in the water, be pushed and pulled by air and water currents and other more cumbersome types of interaction. It was hard to get used to walking so slowly compared to other games, but it works well for Shinsekai: Into The Depths. Because the map is very large, slow travel could be aggravating, but every bit is filled with many things, it is hard to find and do everything while following the main questline. The slower pace made the more intense fights with creatures or cinematic discoveries have a greater impact and overall better value to the player.

There are many mechanics including; weapons, crafting for upgrades and ammo, searching, climbing, swimming, and all sorts of things. But another major stand out for this game was the way in which the sea was expanded. The game simply says that a players suit is unable to go deeper because of the high water pressure. So, players upgrade the suit to be able to access another 50 meters or so of water. This is a simple and elegant mechanic to slowly reveal the large, underwater world over time while giving players a lot of freedom in how and when to approach objectives.

This game isn’t without its flaws though. Even though the floaty swimming, slow walking underwater combat, and other dangers of the sea feel real, they can also become annoying at times and really hit players unexpectedly. It was never so much that I couldn’t recover, but something felt unfair, unavoidable or oddly placed and timed. Being “realistic” can be really cool, but is it necessary at the price of being really well-paced?  Shinsekai suffers from this issue in a handful of instances, and it could have been avoided if the focus was on pure gameplay experience instead of realism at times.

Shinsekai: Into The Depths is a game of surprising depth (pun intended). There is a slew of other games that do some things much better than Shinsekai, but it doesn’t mean this game isn't an entertaining experience without any value. Players should be ready for a very specific type of experience that can be really fun if the slower and somewhat clunky gameplay is happily embraced.

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