clintor24 2025-04-07 02:33
Nice post process effects. Really sells the feeling of being in deep water. I think the speed of the gameplay is a bit slow though. I found myself wishing I could move faster.
Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → LD57 → SATURATION
By swooty
| Category | Rank | Score | Count | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Overall | 123 | 3.53 | 30 | |
| Fun | 264 | 2.75 | 30 | |
| Innovation | 171 | 3.19 | 30 | |
| Theme | 38 | 4.16 | 30 | |
| Graphics | 47 | 4.10 | 31 | |
| Audio | 72 | 3.66 | 30 | |
| Mood | 51 | 3.89 | 31 |
Nice post process effects. Really sells the feeling of being in deep water. I think the speed of the gameplay is a bit slow though. I found myself wishing I could move faster.
I like the mood that you're going for, and it's very on theme. Gameplay-wise, for me, it felt too slow and frustrating, especially since you have to go around quite a bit to have a clue where to head towards (the sonar is not very responsive).
It goes very well with the theme as it clearly gives a sensation of depths :) However the game lacks clear goals which doesn't make it very fun to play, even for a slow experience it is quite empty, something like 3D arrows indicating a goal to reach and the position of the ship after you exit it would have been nice. Good execution tho, I like the enemies animations.
echoing what others are saying about the game flow feeling a little slow. but I absolutely love the graphics and mood/atmosphere, you nailed those. from the images alone it looks steam ready. nice submission!
This took me a few tries to beat; the gameplay is kind of puzzly in the sense that once you figure out what works and what doesn't you can complete the game fairly quickly (though with slightly raised cortisol levels :P).
The controls felt a bit unintuitive to me, especially given that they change between when you're inside and outside the sub. I would have appreciated some on-screen help.
Final note: the submarine reminded me strongly of [Archimedes](https://watchmen.fandom.com/wiki/Archimedes).
Congratulations - you actually managed to give me a mini jumpscare with those fish-robot monsters, haha! I was reparing the pipe and thinking they were pretty easy to avoid, only to look to the right and see two orange eyes staring right at my face! That was fun.
Contrary to what some of the others said, I didn't mind the controls, I think you successfully captured the feeling of controlling a small submarine in the ocean depths and this kind of game needs to be slower-paced.
However, most of the challenge of the game, to me, came from figuring out the HUD. I read your description about the ping, and I left the submarine multiple times when I heard consistent pings before I understood the sub pings when it is near walls.
The arrows and the circle are okay to understand height, but the rectangle getting smaller when you are near the leak also took me a while to understand. I'm not sure what the better design decision would have been here, but I have a feeling there's ways these could be improved to be better game mechanics or more interestings parts of the experience. Maybe if it took inspiration from actual submarine controls to sell that feeling even more?
Overall, I really enjoyed my time with it. I appreciate the details like descending into the ocean at the beginning, the way the monsters animate and react, and the graphics and mood of the game. It actually reminded me a bit of Outer Wilds. I'm amazed you managed to create this in 48 hours.
Great job!
Incredibly atmospheric. I truly felt like a lone diver at the very bottom of the ocean. An excellent game!
Very impressive, you absolutely nailed it with the atmosphere here. Visuals here are incredibly well made. You managed to get a lot out of relatively simple assets, and that's always super hard to do in 48 hours. For some reason, those endless pipelines reminded me of Tesseract in Interstellar, but not really quite sure why. They definitely sold the idea of massive, pretty much endless refinery, must be something for people with thalassophobia. UI is also excellent, I love the use of glowing effects, which makes it look super clean and cool. Sounds are also really well made, and I just think this is pretty much flawless in this regard. During my gameplay, I played around a little bit due to being curious, and I was like: "Oh, those creatures have adorable eyes" and then they bit me in the face; lesson learned! I think sonar took me a little while to figure out. Though when you sit and think for couple of seconds, it makes sense, so, I'm not quite sure what I would suggest there. Maybe also left/right indicators, but it's a question whether that wouldn't make it way too easy. All in all, very impressive and I would be very surprised if this didn't score very high, excellent job for 48 hours game!
Really impressive technical achivement with this! The graphics and sound are really on another level, and they really homed in the atmosphere and feeling of dread.
Personally I prefer in game tutorials, and I couldn't figure out the controls. Honestly I didn't figure out the game - I understood the compass above tell me if I'm close or not, but the sumarine moved so slowly and the boost was so rate I got discouraged to explore
Maybe the gameplay is just not for me, the technical parts here are really something else!
Nice! Took me three tried to do it, every time reading a bit more of the description to get some kind of an idea what I was supposed to be doing and how to do so. Would have been nice to have some of that information in game. Only thing that was there was the very final button press needed to fix the leak at which point one has to assume you've already read all the other instructions.
The distance meter wasn't the most intuitive thing the guess what it was trying to say. Didn't help that I had no idea what I was looking for either. Obviously I thought more bar was better. Nope, obviously not! After trial and erroring with it in all the wrong ways, it was kinda easy in the end. How is the target spot generation? I think every time it was pretty much on the starting level for me so the whole up/down indication thing was kinda moot too.
The dual control system also felt awkward but I guess it makes sense as the sub needs to be slower in its movements and wouldn't really work with mouse controls that well. I guess you'd get used to it if the game was longer. But the controls both themselves were great. No issues there at all.
The game looked and sounded suberb! I have nothing bad to really say about it. Nice and moody. Very good UI work too with some nice color choices.
And of course, thanks for making a mac version too! It's sadly not too common, especially on compo side of things. Did have to do the usual chmod +x and right click to open shenanigans but the game worked flawlessly after that.
The game was easily good enough to stretch it on a little longer. The first fix is only like the tutorial and it was already over. Could have easily made it be like three fixes in a row with maybe the oxygen filled after each.
Anyways, good job! 👍
The controls are very interesting, I felt like a diver with little room to maneuver. It's not perfect but i liked it ! Your graphics and post processing are good as well. Good job !
Interesting mechanics!Well done!
Great concept, struggled with the controls at first but then really got going. The mood here is outstanding. Amazing work :smile:
https://youtu.be/2WTHx4uHM0w
Had a nice time playing it on stream :)
Great liminal experience and very immersive! I bet it gets much better if you play at night in the unlit room!
~Xp
had a few goes at this but unfortunately never managed to find anything. The mood is great, and I have to call out the excellent font and UI design! :) Solid entry and intriguing.
Nice work! Good job with the mood, it definitely had some good tension, especially when getting out of the sub. It definitely took a sec to figure out the controls and get oriented, it wasn't very intuitive to figure out which direction is up and down but I did kinda like that! I would have loved some more audio to sell the atmosphere a little bit more, the silence was nice but I thought it could use some more ambience to make it a bit more tense. Overall nice job!