exploration - gamebastion.com

The developer of Full Fathom describes it as a "thalassophobia sim". You are the lone engineer on a rustbucket submarine exploring the dangerous waters of a submerged country in an alternate reality 1990s. The warning lights on the control panel are flashing, a buzzer is spluttering like a dying bluebottle, and your robotic assistant is about as useful as an umbrella in the Mariana Trench. Things could not get any worse. And then you see it. Something in the green haze outside. Something with a tail.

We've seen Full Fathom breach the surface a few times in various Screenshot Saturdays but now there's a playable demo as part of Steam Next Fest. In the most pitchy of elevators it is "horror Subnautica". You can leave your submarine to swim through the ruins of flooded skyscrapers and houses, salvaging for fuel tanks and canned food among other necessities. But you also need to pilot the submersible (albeit in quite an auto-piloty way) between numbered points of interest in the ocean.

So yes, it is a bit like the wet wandering of Unknown Worlds' survival game. Yet there is something greebly and clunky about the machinery of Full Fathom. This is not the smooth and sleek Frutiger Aero interface of Alterra Corporation, but a grimy, barely functional platter of non-descript buttons and unlabelled levers. Switches and handles and valves and cranks, all of which must be figured out mostly by, well, pressing them. Like this!

Oh dear. All the lights just went out.

The game's demo went up in July, so I'm a little late to the underwater party. But I won't let that stop me. "Use your throttle," advises a handy leaflet in the control room. "Holes are bad." In the end, I barely get the submarine moving and almost perish in a nearby ruin. Outside the ship, spikey urchins will puncture your suit and sap your strength. I get lost in a dark house when my flare goes out. Luckily I am scroungy enough to have picked up a can of compressed air for emergencies.

I can't fully blame myself