For most of us, the ocean is a fundamentally alien space. Deep-sea biology, and the world in which it thrives, is so distinct from life on the surface that what lies below is, as a game designer might put it, a place of infinite possibility. Anything could be down there.

In Song of the Deep, the new 2-D exploration game from Insomniac Games, what's down there is your father. You play Merryn, the daughter of a fisherman who vanished beneath the waves. You build a submarine to go after him, and find a world beyond imagining. Forests of giant luminescent kelp strung over ancient clockwork machines, elaborate ruins dotting the sea floor, mermaids and talking seahorses and leviathans the size of skyscrapers.

Song of the Deep, out now on PC, PlayStation 4, and Xbox One, seeks to conjure the wonder and terror of this world, filtered through the sensibilities of Irish folklore and children's animation. At times, it does a splendid job. It conjures something else alongside it, though the spectre of videogame tedium, fast behind like a shark. It can't quite escape.

Insomniac Games

The game is a bit of an experiment. Insomniac Games has an unprecedented publishing deal with GameStop, the videogame retail juggernaut. With the used-games market upon which it built its fortune sinking, GameStop must diversify. Game publishing and marketing is one avenue it's pursuing. Under the deal, Insomniac gets to make a game it might not otherwise get to make—a small, intimate passion project in a genre the company isn't known for—and GameStop gets into game-making with a grab for something like vertical integration.

Creatively, Song of the Deep marries a broadly appealing story with classic design. Its art and narrative are drawn from the likes of Studio Ghibli and Disney; this game stars a young girl, and one can easily imagine it being played by young girls and their parents. From the looks of it, this does not appear to be a "gamer's game." From a design perspective, though, it draws from an old well. It resembles games like Super Metroid and Castlevania: Symphony of the Night, with similar mechanical conceits. You play in a semi-open 2-D space, constrained by barriers that can be surmounted with the right abilities. Your mandate is to explore, squirreling out secrets from the wilderness, solving puzzles to gain new abilities and open once-forbidden parts of the map.

It's not an altogether happy marriage. The puzzles are often simple but tedious. One time, I had to tow a bomb with my submarine's grappling hook to blow up a barrier. It required wiggling through a tight stretch of rock outcropping. If the bomb touched rock, it detonated. If I took too long, it detonated. With inexact physics fighting me all along, the task, which took 10 seconds to comprehend, took more than five minutes to complete. This happens a lot. At other moments, Song of the Deep offers more tasks than necessary, padding its brief run time with quests that feel like busywork.

Insomniac Games

Yet this is a beautiful game, and when Insomniac cares to focus, Merryn's story has a kernel of poignant vulnerability that lends it power. She's a tiny presence in an utterly foreign world, searching for her father—and for herself. The scale of the ocean is frequently stirring, and the art direction is mesmerizing. It's enough to paper over the mundanity of your tasks—for awhile, at least.

It's a pity that it doesn't work both ways. Well before the game ends, the puzzles stop feeling connected to the narrative in any meaningful way. They don't communicate wonder, or terror, or the other emotions the game wants to get across. They're obstacles because Song of the Deep believes it needs them. Somewhere around the time I had to collect a third missile type to open up the magma doors so I could do the light puzzles, I realized that I didn't feel like an underwater explorer—I felt like a keyring in search of locks to open.

Gameplay and narrative are inextricably intertwined, and ought to reinforce and point toward one another. In Song of the Deep, they feel at odds in a way that's made even more grating by the loving, attentive eye Insomniac casts on the world it created. These people care about Merryn and her journey, and they do so much to make you care, too. Now they just need to get out of her way.