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Under the Sea's itch.io pageResults
| Criteria | Rank | Score* | Raw Score |
| Mental Engagement | #2 | 4.400 | 4.400 |
| Overall | #3 | 4.200 | 4.200 |
| Overall | #4 | 4.047 | 4.047 |
| Lasting Impression | #9 | 3.900 | 3.900 |
| Characterization | #11 | 4.020 | 4.020 |
| Atmosphere | #13 | 4.280 | 4.280 |
| Emotional Engagement | #18 | 3.480 | 3.480 |
Ranked from 50 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.
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Comments
I always like the aquatic base thriller type setting, both isolated and surrounded by water. The puzzles are varied and cool, my favorite part was how the cipher was used. It was easy figuring it out as Scotty, then the password threw me for a loop. I really liked the distraction puzzle too, tying an earlier part of the narrative to a later solution. So many good ideas here, great job!
Thank you. Good to see so many people had fun with the cipher; we weren't sure about that. (ek)
Excellent submission, I enjoyed it all the way through. Absolutely great, congratulations !!!
Much appreciated, thank you very much. (ek)
Your team always delivers, but this has been my fav so far! That exterior art is really evocative, the puzzles were varied, interesting and didn't feel contrived, and they helped build the characters, which is rare to see, but super important to me. (though I think the ah... reversal thing was a bit mean, I had to look that up :P) Would have loved more moody lighting in the interior, like the exterior shot (and when the lights are out) to make it more atmospheric, but hard to think of anything to improve on this one! Really amazing job!
Thank you so much for your kind words!
he he he - I really didn't expect that final twist .-) - one last great thing for a gorgeous game - I loved the characters and the story.
btw I tried the game before you added the "swimthrough" and then I didn't understand the move-torch thing - after then everything was (almost) smooth
Congratulations
Thank you!
We were a bit torn about this first puzzle sequence and whether it was a bit too tricky for the start of the game, but we liked it too much to scratch the puzzle completely and it wouldn't fit at a later point of the game... Glad to hear you kept going.^^
Really?
No seriously, are you for real?
I knew I was going to get a good game from you, but this is incredible, even beyond my expectations. Wow.
^^ Thank you, Guga! We are very happy that you liked it.
This was a pleasant surprise! I really really enjoyed this.
Well done!!
Adding voice over to this and you more or less have a commercial product! <3
Thank you very much. That's high praise.
We also would love to have voice over in our games. But it's the same story every year: we start writing our texts too late. The last lines were added only a couple of hours (or was it minutes?) before the deadline. (ek)
(FYI: Your comment was posted twice, I deleted the second one.)
What a polished production. This was really well done team congratulations!. I got stuck on one puzzle but stuck with it and finally worked it out, feels good when it clicks :) Great work!
Thank you. Glad you liked it enough to keep going after you got stuck. ^^
What a polished game! And it's quite long too! Some puzzles had me stumped (parts of me because I was stupid with the second part of the code and because I didn't know you could swap objects between characters). I think I had the biggest problems with the code because I never knew which letters were already substituted and which needed changing. This confused me a bit.
The setting initially didn't click for me as I think I've seen enough underwater stations in videogames but the writing and interesting twists made it grow on me A LOT. I think some things came off as a bit flippant seeing that they just lost an "esteemed" colleague but overall the writing was really solid.
Thank you very much for your nice review.
We know the story has some flaws, but we didn't really work on it before the jam started, so there wasn't enough time to make it perfect. (ek)
Sorry if this came off as too negative, I tend to talk too much about what I think can be made better. But I really have to give kudos to you for making me care so much about a setting that I just personally don't like (but that's just taste). It really shows that the gameplay and story DO work very well.
Maybe it's because I can't help to compare to last years entry. And since I studied archaeology that REALLY vibed with me :)
Don't worry, I didn't consider your comment as too negative. And even if it was, it would have been a valuable feedback. For me (and I think my team-mates would agree), the comments we get are better feedback than any ratings. So we appreciate any comment - be it positive or negative or indifferent (that doesn't mean people should stop rating).
Sorry we didn't go for underwater archaeology this year. Atlantis is still good for another adventure, I guess ... ;-) (ek)
I'm taking you by your word for the next gamejam :)
Don't worry. Personally I don't mind harsh criticism because learning from mistakes is important. Developers can't be swayed by every single negative impression of play testers or players, but need to adjust their vision of the game (or future games) with the feedback gained from players. Some points may be there on purpose - like having a few puzzles that are not solved at a glance - while others are not like bad telegraphing of what the player is supposed to do, pixel hunting or unbelievable reactions of characters.
Jam games are inherently more flawed than "complete" releases, so I understand why people don't like to criticize too much and that's okay, too.
Absolutely agree that a developer can only learn from honest feedback. But giving feedback is also a skill. One that I am also trying to learn in this gamejam (after learning a LOT on how to work in a team as opposed to the solo-work I'm used to!).
That was really well done as well as the puzzles, gg !
Thank you. (ek)
Loved it! Really nicely put together. The initial conversation to get the flashlight was a bit tough to figure out and then the dark room was a bit off putting but overall it was great! I wonder if it would have been better to make the dark experience a bit later in the game somehow, so that the player gets to experience the awesome atmosphere a bit more? But that's just my subjective thoughts.
Thank you for the comment.
We actually thought about having the power outage puzzle later in the game. But it just didn't match our storyline - and it was already too late to rethink everything. So we just tried to make it not too difficult right at the beginning. (ek)
I tried it on German language, to see if my high-school days German studies would finally pay off. I didn't understand anything. Switched to English and finally got to see the excellent story. Really good game!
Sorry to hear that. ;-)
Thank you for the nice words anyway. (ek)
Well polished, well executed. Got stuck but I feel its more a me problem than the game's problem.
If you need help: I just uploaded the official
walkswimthrough to our game page. Read carefully to not get spoiled too much.Apart from that: thank you for your comment. (ek)
I really liked the atmosphere, great music and writing. Puzzles were a bit difficult for my taste, but overall a great game :)
Thanks for the nice review. (ek)
The puzzles in this were remarkably well designed. You struck just the right balance providing a sense of accomplishment when solving them and a minimum of frustration. I particularly liked solving the substitution cypher.
Thank you very much. It's good to know that there are people who liked the diary puzzle. (ek)
I've grown to expect a that a game from the Argonauts will have gorgeous graphics, great attention to detail, good sensible puzzles, and more polish than we have any right to hope for in a jam game. Under the Sea did not disappoint. Fantastic work, folks!
Thank you, shdon. We're glad to have met your expectations. :o) (ek)
When the Argonauts team releases a new project, we can expect a game as rich as it is original, while offering particularly successful moments of reflection. Under the Sea is no exception to the rule, offering a very well-designed adventure, with several characters including two playable ones, successful dialogues, object management, puzzles, ... All served with worthy handmade graphics professional comics. A new adventure that will entertain players for a few hours, and which joins the panel of Argonauts successes. Congratulation for this game which honors the adventure game genre (specifically Point & Click) !
Owww, thank you Yaz, you are too kind! If we entertained you for a little while our mission to the bottom of the sea was a success. (even if Dr. Kaminsky might think otherwise ;-) )
I really liked playing this. just saw at the end that I could have used to set the continue text setting to manually.but thats an user error.
nice atmosphere and mechanics. I think that was really a lot of work to cover all possible situations , combinations and permutations of character-item-usage, and a lot dialog writing and conception.
also nice menus with a lot of settings.
kudos
Thank you for the kind review.
Sorting out who may talk with whom about what at which stage of the story grew complex indeed. I've already noticed one of the texts being assigned to the wrong character (first entry for our bugs list). (ek)
Really cool concept! The flashlight mechanic at the start is great and it’s a lot of fun trying out all the different dialogues to see how people react.
Presentation on this is outstanding, very good job! 5 Stars!
Thank you very much. (ek)
To tell you the truth, I really liked the game, the atmosphere!
But I got stuck deciphering Dr. Kaminski's diary... the answer might have been right in front of me, but I'm probably very dumb xD
Really no need to feel dumb. We knew that wouldn't be everyone's favourite puzzle. ;-)
I guess you have probably figured out that you can swap two characters by pressing two buttons successively (e.g. pressing A then B swaps all As and Bs in the text). Start with the word at the top - seeing that this is a diary page, it should be obvious what it's supposed to be. And only one of the thinkable words fits. The second line may not be so obvious yet but is also a phrase frequently found in a diary. Maybe try the first word in the third line first (the one with the apostrophe). If you got this, too, you have almost all the vowels identified. Then try to identify words throughout the text. (ek)
I've figured it out! Thanks for the tips!
And managed to finish the game!