![]() ![]() You can't hurt any of them, and they can't hurt you - nor do they want to. There are loads of types of animals too - while the whales are the stars of the show, there are leatherback turtles, whale sharks, spider crabs, and dozens more - with each level having its own location-appropriate mix. The animals living in those environments are exacting replicas too, with the best swimming animations I've ever seen in a game, and 3D models so good I almost don't resent the fact that virtually every mission objective boils down to looking closely at them. In that sense, the simulation is spot on. The dive environments vary wildly, from shallow water tropical reefs to sepulchral, lightless chasms where hot water vents rumble, and all are modelled painstakingly after examples of real biomes. You don't just zoom around glibly shouting "SCIENCE!" while doing nothing of the sort. Yes, it's a little abstracted, and way too often boils down to "scanning" whale after whale after whale, but while the tech might be fudged, the rationale for the things you're doing makes complete sense. On the dives themselves, which make up the bulk of the game, you do science. Leatherback turtle: a classic reptile.Īnd unlike so, so many stories which claim to be about scientists and then turn out to be about adventure brutes who can do maths, it really is about scientists. Equally, while the game has a deadly serious environmental point to make, it never strays into either simplicity or pious preaching. Beyond Blue's writers managed phenomenally well prioritising the delivery of information without losing cohesion as a story. They're brilliantly voice acted, and manage to blop a constant flow of educational material at the player without ever seeming like grisly living textbooks. The others are voices over the pipes, either talking into your suit headset during dives, or having chats with you in your sub's cockpit as you gaze out at manta rays and sunfish in between bouts of the ol' splashy-splashy. Those other characters are Morai's worry-prone, super serious colleague Andre, a landlubber research scientist called Irina who seems a bit Big Pharma until you get to know her, and Morai's little sister Ren, who's back home living with their now dementia-stricken Grandma, and struggling to stay in university. But like all of Beyond Blue's small cast of characters, she manages to stop just short of being an unbearable goodie two-flippers. Written without sufficient subtlety, Morai would be nauseatingly wholesome. You are Morai, a marine biologist who was raised to love the sea by her free-diving Grandmother, and who currently lives in a little near-future submarine, tracking a family of sperm whales and occasionally livestreaming her dives. But Beyond Blue held firm, and took me back to the surface with a slightly lighter soul. The smallest dent in its integrity might have seen it implode and flood with tons of icy mediocrity. Because it approaches its subject so deftly, and so decently, that it works. You can't use the toilet, which is annoying, but the set dressing does change between dives.īut with that warning dispensed, I'm going to go ahead and recommend it anyway. If you want thrills, chills and hundreds of hours of replayability for every penny spent, forget about it. Indeed, for a game about something so vast and mysterious, Beyond Blue offers a starkly constrained range of things to do. There are sixteen short documentaries included, unlockable along the way, and. There are eight modestly-sized levels, with visual-novel-type interludes telling a thoughtful, bittersweet story in between. The answer, it transpires, was a very simple diving simulator, about swimming up to a range of extremely realistic marine animals and clicking on them. The sea and its contents are possibly the most potent preoccupation in my overly-preoccupied life, and so I was open to whatever these people wanted to sprinkle on me. I didn't actually know what it was, you know, as a game. I knew that it would feature whales in some capacity. I knew that it promised a sober and ultra-realistic exploration of the oceans, and that the Flaming Lips were on the soundtrack. When I began playing, I knew that it had been made in association with the filmmakers behind the Blue Planet II series, and in consultation with a host of marine scientists. So many are the dignities heaped upon Beyond Blue, that it's somewhat hard to get at the game beneath. With gorgeous seascapes, nuanced writing and a heart the size of a whale's, Beyond Blue sets a new bar for educational games - but as pure entertainment, it has its limits.
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