Submerged

This game is in many ways wonderful, but sadly I must give it a thumbs down because it fails to deliver.

The world is incredibly evocative, presented in subdued strokes via graphics, design, music, and especially sound. The best part of the game is simply moving through the world, hearing the sounds of waves and animals and scraping as you climb and shimmy across buildings.

The story is likewise subtle. If you find all the game's secrets, you will have a collection of pictographs accompanied by a secret alphabet that together reveal the personal story of the protagonist as well as the greater history of the world. There's nothing especially deep therein, but the minimalist narrative works very well with the portrayal of the world.

Unfortunately, the gameplay is miserably boring due to complete lack of variation. The buildings you explore are all almost identical. After the first one, there is simply nothing new to discover. You can make the game a bit more interesting for yourself by finding all the secrets (and getting an achievement), but getting the secrets is pure busy work: scouring the map for them and collecting them. Annoyingly, many of them are hidden in buildings, and you will have to do a lot of backtracking to find them all. So not only are the buildings repetitive and boring, but you are forced to repeat the same boring segments again and again...

It's a shame that the breathtaking vision of the game could not have been accompanied with more gameplay content.