![]() Coupled with Kay’s design, her movements, and those of the characters she encounters it further drives home the fact that the narrative stands on its own far better than it lets on. Visually, Sea of Solitude is a feast for the eyes, with environments that are simultaneously abstract and very real. Worlds like this work best when the player is given time to breathe and explore and figure things out at their own pace, and this game would’ve benefited greatly from keeping that in mind. Kay’s voice doesn’t fit her all that well, and the broken English throughout makes me think it might even have been more effective in the team’s native German. Adding to that are voiceover performances that, while admirable given they were performed mostly by the developers themselves, come off as really awkward. The end result is it feels like Jo-Mei were either unsure of the effectiveness of their storytelling or just didn’t trust players to get the message, and both notions are incorrect. I’m all for an indie game with a simple message free of the intentionally obfuscated wank that we sometimes see, but SoS wouldn’t have that problem even if it had half its dialogue stripped. Straight off the bat there is just too much unnecessary dialogue from the characters explaining what’s going on, including spelling out nearly all of its imagery and double meanings. It’s easy to see that Cornelia is telling a very personal story with SoS and that’s something I always love to see in gaming.Īs great as the themes that Sea of Solitude tackles are, and as much as I appreciate how raw and unapologetically it portrays them, the game kind of fumbles the delivery. There are a lot of great messages to be found about how the most loved and secure people can still experience feeling lonely, even when surrounded by friends or family, and sometimes because of it. Everything Kay faces speaks to her past with her family and her feelings of intense loneliness, as she learns how the two are interconnected. As the game continues and Kay starts to understand her situation the world around her shifts and changes to reflect her mental state tides rising and lowering, huge towers blowing angry smoke from their vents as she attempts to climb them and the entire place being engulfed by ice. ![]() Before long, she’s met by a couple of huge monsters that threaten to halt her progress, but as she explores and starts to piece together memories of her past she learns that these monsters are more familiar than is first apparent. Resembling something other than her usual, human self and with fuzzy memory, Kay decides to sail onward and figure out what’s going on. Sea of Solitude will be released under the EA Originals banner in early 2019 for PC, PlayStation 4 and Xbox One.Sea of Solitude tells the story of Kay, a woman who awakes completely alone on a small boat in a city that’s almost completely underwater. “This is what being human is all about, and this is what our game is all about,” explained Geppert. Ultimately, the player’s goal is to bring all those emotions to a balance and help Kay embrace the destructive traits and self-doubt the same as joy and hope. In the game, you’ll explore not only why this happened to Kay, but also help to change her back into a normal human by confronting an ocean full of creatures just like her. Sea of Solitude is about a young woman named Kay who is suffering from such strong loneliness that her inner feelings of darkness, anger, and hopelessness materialize on the outside, turning her into a monster. An underlying concept that Geppert says is “so important and so unique that nearly every human being can at least somehow relate to or remember the feeling of being lonely.” While the subject matter may seem dark and heavy, Geppert assures us that this is done in a playful way, but players who really want to dive into the emotional piece behind these themes will definitely have the chance to do so. Sea of Solitude is her artistic representation of that loneliness and Geppert hopes that players will be able to “see, hear, and hopefully feel” how loneliness turns us into monsters as they play Sea of Solitude. ![]() “When humans get too lonely, they turn into monsters.” This is how the game’s Creative Director, Cornelia Geppert opened her presentation on Sea of Solitude, a game that Geppert began writing when she was at the loneliest point of her life. During the presentation, the studio announced the latest around a number of its flagship properties such as FIFA, Madden, and Star Wars Battlefront, but sandwiched between all of the major releases was an indie title from Berlin developer Jo-Mei Games titled Sea of Solitude. Yesterday Electronic Arts (EA) kicked off E3 2018 with the EA Play press conference.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |