Yesterday I went for a swim in the chilled out watery wonderland of Abzu. Today I’m watching the release trailer for Narcosis [official site] – a survival horror game which is the exact opposite in terms of its approach to underwater exploration. Narcosis is about the TERROR and the ISOLATION and the fact that these fish will not be giving you a chill piggyback ANYWHERE.



To experience this #content, you will need to enable targeting cookies. Yes, we know. Sorry.

Manage cookie settings



“First conceived as a student project, this first person survival story unfolds from inside a “walking coffin” — a half-ton, high-tech deep-sea dive suit — following an industrial catastrophe. Influenced and inspired by a growing appetite for unconventional horror and narrative-driven games, Narcosis is rooted in reality, but steeped in the surreal.”

I wrote about it a couple of years ago having played a build at an expo in Paris. In the intervening time I’ve revisited the idea multiple times, mostly for the purposes of threatening to get Adam to play it for review what with him being terrified of things that lurk in the deep.

To be fair to Adam, he would probably survive longer than me in a game where you should be afraid of things that lurk in the deep because he would leave them alone whereas I would probably be all up in their business trying to see what they looked like up close and what they were eating and where they were going and all manner of other nosy parker stuff.

For example, here is a video of me working out how to get past a big crab when what I really wanted to do was hang out with the big crab and see what it was doing other than trying to kill me:



To experience this #content, you will need to enable targeting cookies. Yes, we know. Sorry.

Manage cookie settings



I’ve been looking through the promo art and there are some lovely jellyfish and a cool octopus in there so I’m going to pop them here for you too:

Narcosis is out today on Steam, Humble and Oculus for £15.99. I’ve only played it properly via the VR headset demo a while back but there’s a non-VR mode as well which I’ve just started and which is in the video above. I’m not sure you’d get the same sense of having your peripheral vision taken away in that one though.