Under The Waves

I keep thinking about the moment the deep-sea floor stops looking like a workplace and starts looking like the inside of a mind. That shift is what Under The Waves is actually about, and Parallel Studio earns it patiently. You play as Stan Moray, a professional diver stationed alone in a retro-futuristic 1979 North Sea, doing routine maintenance for a drilling corporation called UniTrench. The premise sounds dry on purpose. The isolation is the point. The core loop runs on a day-cycle structure: Stan wakes, checks his mission log, and pilots his personal submarine Moon through an open expanse of ocean to complete the day's tasks. You can switch between a third-person exterior view of Moon and a cockpit perspective, and the latter does something quiet and important for the atmosphere. Between missions you collect salvageable debris, gather blueprints, and craft basics like batteries, repair kits, and oxygen tubes. There are also side activities, including a camera for photographing wildlife species and a Guitar Hero-style minigame if you find a guitar in a wreck. None of this is mechanically deep. Reviewers were consistent: the gameplay does not break new ground, some maintenance tasks loop back on themselves, and the controls become slightly awkward when Stan has to navigate narrow spaces on foot rather than in the sub. A crafting layer exists but most players end up ignoring it unless forced. Keep those expectations honest and the repetition stops feeling like a flaw and starts feeling like Stan's actual psychology under pressure. The world itself is where Parallel Studio spent their effort. The contrast between vast bioluminescent open water and oil-slicked industrial tunnels is striking, and the art direction gives the whole thing a hand-molded quality that raw graphical fidelity alone would not achieve. The environmental messaging is woven in through corroded pipelines, plastic clouds, and visual oil damage on the seabed, in collaboration with the Surfrider Foundation. Occasionally the writing becomes a little heavy-handed, with Stan reciting statistics in his diary that feel more like a pamphlet than a character moment. When the game trusts its visuals to carry the ecology theme instead, it works considerably better. The score by Nicolas Bredin is the quiet standout. It bends between bittersweet and genuinely unsettling, and it knows when to go silent. On the narrative side, this is a game about grief as submersion. Stan lost his daughter Pearl and came underwater to stop having to surface and face it. His wife Emma is trying to reach him, technically and emotionally. As the days pass, his ability to separate the real from the hallucinatory deteriorates, and the missions begin to reflect that fracture. The story is largely linear with one meaningful binary choice at the very end, so players expecting the branching agency of a Quantic Dream title proper will need to recalibrate. There are two endings, both described by multiple reviewers as genuinely affecting. Some subplots get dropped before they resolve, and the finale feels slightly rushed relative to the build-up, but the journey is consistent enough that the shortfall does not erase the emotional weight. At around six to seven hours for the main story, the game knows roughly when to stop. One real caution: at launch, Under The Waves shipped with a credible set of technical issues, including hard crashes, mission-tracking failures, and erratic animations in the life module. The PC version received comparatively warmer reception than the console builds, and patches have addressed some of this over time. It is worth checking current community reports before committing if you are sensitive to that kind of roughness. The swimming controls also have a known friction point when trying to move directly up or down in tight spaces, which creates minor frustration during a handful of story sequences. This is a game for the Firewatch and Beyond Blue corner of your library, not the Subnautica one. Players who went into it expecting survival tension came away disappointed. Players who wanted a quiet, scored, visually considered meditation on loss came away moved. I am firmly in the second camp, and I think Under The Waves deserves more attention than it got.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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