Submerged is a third-person combat-free game in which you explore a mysterious flooded city. You take on the role of Miku, a young girl who brings her wounded brother to the city in their small fishing boat. The purpose of the game is to navigate the flooded city streets by boat, scale the drowned buildings, and use your telescope to scour the city for old supply drops needed to save your dying sibling. The story of the brother and sister, as well as the city, is told through pictograms that you find throughout the world. The environment is beautifully constructed and you feel the desolation of the vast open world. Unfortunately, repetitive gameplay and performance issues detract from the experience. While the story captures your interest, the technical aspects of the game overshadow it all.
There are two main mysteries in the game. The first is the story behind how Miku’s brother got injured. That ties into the history of the family. The second is the mystery behind why the city is flooded and the origins of its twisted inhabitants. This part of the game keeps you interested and compels you to find every collectible to uncover the secret behind it all. The story of the family is told in parts. Each time you find a supply drop to treat your injured brother, more of the children’s story is revealed. Even though finding drops gets rather tedious because you repeat the same exact steps every time, the story keeps you hooked throughout the experience. It is hard to put the controller down and that is a piece of the game the developers should be commended for. With that said, spotting tattered parachutes almost a dozen times and then climbing up seemingly similar skyscrapers gets tiresome very fast. The main buildings where drops are located have their own unique architecture, but scaling them feels rather similar. The gameplay should have been varied as to avoid this issue.
There are numerous collectibles in the game that will keep you busy for hours. Finding the supply drops is only part of the experience. As stated earlier, the story of the flooded city is told through dozens of pictograms scattered across the world. You will have to climb countless buildings and find alternative paths to get them all. While some of the pictograms are open to interpretation, they still reveal everything you need to know to understand what happened to the city. There is also a variety of wildlife to spot including the humanoid inhabitants of the flooded ruins. Who are they? What are they? You will have to play the game to find out. That was one of the key parts of the story that kept me glued to my television until I had an answer. Submerged does not offer a lot of replayability, but finding all the secrets compensates for that. You can also upgrade your boat to make it go faster multiple times so that enhances the experience.
Miku has a map and telescope which makes exploration easier. New areas are automatically added to the map after you pass them. The telescope can be used to mark drops, pictograms and boat upgrades. Spotted items are also marked on the map. Both of them are invaluable tools and add to gameplay variety. You can either aimlessly wander the city trying to find drops or you can adopt a systematic approach by using the telescope and map. I tried the first approach but once I adopted the second the game became easier and more enjoyable.
Controlling Miku and the boat is very difficult. It is a challenge at times to go where you want to go. I do not think this is because of poor controls, but rather due to the fact that the game’s frame rate constantly fluctuates. A fluctuating frame rate leads to erratic controls. There are prolonged freezes and stutters too. The title needs polish and it is not ready for distribution on Xbox One in my opinion. Hopefully other platforms do not have these issues because playing Submerged can get frustrating at times. The developers need to address this before the game launches at the end of this week. I am sure they are aware of these problems and are working on a solution.
Overall, Submerged is a good game that features a fantastic story. It is a shame that it is let down by the repetitive gameplay and technical problems. It is always hard to review a game like this because the story is so good that it makes up for so much. However, gameplay and controls are important parts of the experience so they have to be taken into account. Had the gameplay been varied and the performance issues addressed, this title would have received one of our highest scores ever. While I feel that gamers who can look past the repetitive gameplay and frame rate woes will love this title, the majority of customers take both of those elements into account. Maybe the developers will address these concerns in the future but for right now, Submerged sits at six out of ten for me.
Asher is a games journalist, former News Writer (Gaming) at Windows Central. They contributed 1110 articles to ICXM between 2015–2017, focused on opinion pieces, game reviews, Windows and PC, and Xbox news: wrote over 1,100 ICXM pieces on Xbox news, hardware reviews, and platform commentary before joining Future plc’s Windows Central in 2017.