Diluvion

Diluvion puts you in command of a submarine crawling through a permanently drowned world, and that premise alone does a lot of heavy lifting. The setting is genuinely striking - a dark, pressurized ocean where the remnants of civilization sit frozen under miles of water. Arachnid Games leaned hard into a Jules Verne aesthetic, and when it lands, the world feels like something worth exploring. The visual style splits between a 3D navigable ocean and 2D illustrated interiors for ships and settlements, and that contrast works better than it has any right to. Those hand-painted interior scenes carry real atmosphere and are probably the game's strongest artistic achievement. The RPG layer centers on crew management. You recruit specialists - navigators, gunners, engineers - each slotted into roles that affect your sub's performance in combat and exploration. It is not a deep system by CRPG standards, but it gives you enough attachment to your crew to feel the sting when a bad fight goes sideways. The writing in crew interactions is thin, though. Characters rarely rise above their function, and if you come in hoping for the kind of dialogue that rewards a second read, you will leave disappointed. The worldbuilding has lore worth uncovering, but it is delivered in short, scattered fragments rather than the kind of layered narrative that makes you piece things together with genuine satisfaction. Combat is where the mixed reviews start making sense. Submarine battles require managing oxygen, positioning, and weapon arcs in real time, and early on that tension is genuinely engaging. But the controls feel slippery, enemy encounters can spike without warning, and the checkpoint system has historically punished players harshly for dying far from a save point - a frustration that came up repeatedly in community feedback. Resource scarcity is constant, and not always in the survival-game way that makes scarcity feel meaningful. Sometimes it just feels like the game is stingy to pad runtime. Exploration is the mode where Diluvion is most itself. Moving through dark corridors of flooded architecture, finding sunken ruins, piecing together what the world looked like before the flood - that loop is quietly compelling. The problem is the map gives you very little guidance, which tips from atmospheric mystery into actual confusion more often than intended. Players who bounced off the game frequently cited getting lost not as a feature but as a design gap. For RPG fans specifically, Diluvion is a side trip rather than a destination. The crew system and lore fragments gesture at something richer than what is fully delivered. If you have a high tolerance for rough edges and genuinely love the fantasy of captaining a submarine through a haunted drowned world, there is something real here worth your time. If you need tight writing, clear systems, and choices that actually branch, this will frustrate you inside the first two hours. The 62% Steam rating is honest - it is a flawed game with a beautiful idea at its core, and whether that trade-off works depends entirely on how much the premise hooks you.

Monika · Scout Team

RPGs

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