mixed habitat & densely vegetated hiding places

This is a sequel to Australian studio Uppercut's post-apocalyptic exploration game Submerged, which I reviewed some years back. In the first game, you played as a teen girl searching the drowned ruins of a flooded city for supplies to help your injured brother. Hidden Depths rejoins the same characters a few years later, as this time they work together to solve the mystery of a crushing black vine that has taken over a different flooded city and left only mystical echoes of the people who had been living among the ruins.



The story isn't that important, though. It's basically the same game, just more and better. You still boat around to various buildings that you can parkour through (this time alternating between playing as the sister and the brother) but the locations are prettier and more impressive, and there are more creative worldbuilding surprises and a lot more things to collect. It actually has the vibe of a "collectathon" platformer like Super Mario 64 or Banjo-Kazooie, with the open ocean being the overworld and each building a level with several different categories of collectibles to find there.



It's really not a platformer, though. It looks like a platformer in that your characters jump, climb, swing on vines, cling to ledges, etc. But the game does all that for you. All you have to do is walk to a place where a platforming thing can occur (usually telegraphed with red paint) and it just happens. You can't fall, die, or mess up in any way. Again, this is the same deal as the first game, and it's why I chose to play this now. I wanted to play something chill with lots of eye candy and zero stress, and this fit the bill. It's also short like the first game; I finished the main story in 7 hours and spent a couple more going back for collectibles I missed.



One thing I felt was a big improvement, though maybe not everyone would agree, is that this time when you collect enough comic strip panels to put together a piece of story, the game provides a caption explaining what it means. I really can't understand wordless sequential art, it makes no sense to my brain, so this made my play experience way less confusing.



Submerged: Hidden Depths is available on PC and consoles for $29.99 USD, which I think is too much for such a short and low-impact game. (Same thing I said about the first one!) But it seems to go on sale a lot, so if you want a relaxing title in your library for the kind of day when you need it, I'd say it's one to add to your wishlist.