Submerged: Hidden Depths

My first instinct booting up Submerged: Hidden Depths was to look for a weapon, a stamina bar, something to fight. There is none of that. Uppercut Games built what they call a "relaxploration" game, and every design decision flows from that single idea: you will not fail, you will not die, and nothing in this world will hurt you. Whether that sounds like paradise or a waste of your evening depends entirely on who you are as a player. The loop is split between two modes. On water, you pilot a small motorboat through the drowned rooftops of a flooded city, using a handheld telescope to spot landmarks, collectibles bobbing in the waves, and docking points on crumbling structures. On land, you take control of Miku, a young woman whose curse-turned-gift lets her purge a creeping black corruption called the Mass by carrying magical seeds back to their planting pods. The climbing traversal is fully automated: red-painted ledges, rope swings, ladders, and pipes snap your character along without manual jumping, which is either elegantly accessible or frustratingly on-rails depending on your tolerance. There are boat upgrades to find, cosmetic customizations for Miku unlocked via conch shell collections, diary entries that flesh out the world's backstory, and flowers to bring back to a home garden. None of it is hard. The puzzles top out at "carry object from A to B" difficulty. Critics who wanted a challenge were consistently disappointed; critics who wanted somewhere beautiful to exist for an afternoon were consistently charmed. What actually works is the world itself. The visual design is striking in a way that earns the attention reviewers kept giving it: a dynamic day and night cycle, weather that changes the mood of the ruins entirely, and architecture that shifts tonally between zones. The BAFTA-winning composer Jeff Van Dyck wrote the soundtrack, and it earns its keep, particularly a neat detail where a synth motif builds in pace and density as you carry a seed closer to its burial point. The mute siblings communicate through expression and gesture, and while the story told through collectible diary entries leaves a lot unresolved, the emotional beats between Miku and Taku land well enough. You do not need to have played the original 2015 Submerged to follow anything here. The genuine criticisms are fair ones. The climbing sections are heavily signposted to the point of feeling like guided tours rather than exploration. Invisible walls appear when you stray outside the intended route hunting for collectibles, which is annoying specifically because the game encourages you to look around freely. The runtime sits at roughly six hours for a complete playthrough, and the world, for all its beauty, is sparse enough that some players will feel they are looking at a postcard rather than inhabiting a place. Steam players rate it very positively overall, but the game's identity as a zero-stakes collectathon is something you need to accept upfront rather than discover midway through. For the right person, that six-hour window is not a knock against it. After a week of demanding games, there is genuine appeal in something that asks only for your attention, not your reflexes. Hidden Depths does one thing exceptionally well: it makes a flooded, dying world feel calm, curious, and worth drifting through.

Alex · Scout Team

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