Retrospective: In Other Waters - ★★★☆☆
With Citizen Sleeper 2: Starward Vector dropping recently (and, for what it’s worth, IndieLoupe’s review of it coming soon™) we thought we’d take a look at the previous two games from Jump Over the Age (JOTA) - namely In Other Waters and, surprisingly enough, Citizen Sleeper. JOTA is the one-person game studio of developer Gareth Damian Martin, so it’s their brain we have to thank for these worlds and everything in them. Spoilers for both games to follow — the Citizen Sleeper Retrospective can be found here.
Image: Jump Over the Age / IndieLoupe
In JOTA’s 2020 offering, In Other Waters. The player is an AI guiding xenobiologist Ellery Vas through an uncharted planet called ‘Gliese 677Cc’. If playing as artificial life doesn’t sound like your sort of thing, you mightn’t be in luck with Martin’s games, as it’s a running theme that carries over into the Citizen Sleeper series. The lines are a lot more blurred in the latter, though: in In Other Waters you don’t really question your status, and more-or-less accept that you’re a computer - albeit an intelligent one. The communication options being limited to either ‘yes’ or ‘no’ play a significant part in that, restricting your interaction with Vas to the extent that you can do little more than agree or disagree with the various hypotheses she presents to you throughout the game.
It’s a game where I found it difficult to care about things I wanted to care about, but also caring about things I didn’t think I could. In my late teens, I briefly studied Zoology (rather than Biology) specifically because I wanted to avoid having to learn about plants, fungi and algae. I did make an earnest attempt to share Vas’ enthusiasm for the flora of Gliese 677Cc, but it felt like a chore rather than something that was legitimately interesting me. On the other hand, having any sort of emotional connection to a little yellow circle is not something I particularly expected to encounter.
The game starts slow, though arguably it needs to for the story elements to be impactful further down the line. In what could be argued as another recurrence in JOTA’s games, the player has to put their trust in Gareth Damian Martin’s writing, and have faith that there will be an eventual payoff. I’d say that’s more the case in In Other Waters than in Citizen Sleeper, and that the wheels start turning faster in Martin’s second game.
There is one design choice I can’t stand in In Other Waters, though: the game’s Oxygen and Energy meters. I understand why they’re there - the game’s mechanics are already so limited that if they were stripped back further, there wouldn’t be all that much ‘game’ left. They also provide some level of jeopardy for the player, but, judging by results on the occasions that one of my meters did run out, it seems largely artificial. My issue with them, however, is that the way they are implemented feels at odds with what the rest of the game is trying to achieve.
Every single one of the many hundreds of nodes in the game comes with its own flavour text - it’s rarely anything too remarkable, but those hundreds of snippets combined are what make the game. They alone are the blocks with which Martin has built this incredible world to explore, but due to the constant pressure you feel from the two meters, you’re often rushing past them, not taking the time to read them. In the more hazardous of locations, which become more and more frequent as the game goes on, the feedback the game is constantly giving you is that you need to keep moving: that time is of the essence and that any second spent stood still is a second in which you’ve wasted valuable resources. So you don’t stand still. You don’t take it in, and learn about the world, because the game doesn’t reward you for doing so - it actively punishes it.
It’s a beautiful game that’s critically damaged by one design choice, to the point where I almost wouldn’t recommend it. The world created is enough that it just about overcomes it, but I can’t recall the last time I played something that felt like it sabotaged itself in such a way. I wish I could just turn the meters off and truly explore Gliese.
The strengths, its writing and worldbuilding, hint at what to expect from future JOTA games. In Other Waters is awarded ★★★☆☆ by IndieLoupe.com.
The reviewed product was purchased by IndieLoupe.com.
