Deep Ones (Switch)

Deep Ones are creatures featured in various Lovecraftian tales and the greater Cthulhu mythos, the fish-like race of monster men even serving some of its more famous elder gods like Dagon and Cthulhu himself. However, despite sharing a name with the game Deep Ones, none actually appear in the title despite some clear Lovecraftian inspiration. The great mystery of what lies lurking deep in Earth’s oceans is still a major focus of the title though… at least until it shifts heavily to a focus on silly skeletons.

There really does seem to be an odd tonal inconsistency in the title, with the opening and concluding parts of the game feeling at odds with the bulk of the experience. The game begins with a submariner forced to leave his submarine, a giant red monster from the deep stealing it away as the diver is left alone and vulnerable on the ocean floor. While beautiful at times, the dark depths of the ocean are also incredibly unsafe, so the diver sets off to try and find some way back to the surface, the game beginning with a focus on dark mysterious caves of coral and the natural hazards of unusually large undersea life. In the opening segments of the game things can feel quite tense as you are unsure of which direction the game might go with things, but before there’s any major payoff to such an atmosphere, the lights come on and you’re no longer contending with the sea life as often. Instead, things shift to fighting off a bunch of skeletons who aren’t really trying to be scary at all, some of them downright comical like the dynamite chucking variety that almost looks like an undead hillbilly. For a long time the game seems to forget it ever even had horror elements, and while the skeletons are generally goofy, they don’t really constitute a full shift to comedy since it’s mostly just small details rather than outright jokes that make them comical. The diver is unable to speak and the plot really does seem to keep its focus on leaving the ocean so there’s not much to latch onto there, but the inconsistent direction here can’t hope to compete with the sloppy design of the game experience.

When the adventure begins, you only really have the ability to jump, and since these early areas are more focused on setting a spooky tone they’ll never follow through with, the platforming it is up against is very mild. There will be more difficult jumps later, but it’s never really something that’s challenging in an interesting way. Your slow and floaty jump match the underwater setting, but its never really gets to be put through its paces because it’s not really designed for tight platforming. There are many gaps to jump across but these aren’t so much challenges as just necessary parts of progression, and some of them are falls back to earlier parts of the level if they are missed just so they can be needless punishment for your clunky jump’s failures. The game does briefly flirt with an idea of rising bubble platforms that will pop after you jump on them, but since you will need a second before the game will let you leap again, you can end up losing all your necessary platforms because the game won’t let you hop between them quickly enough. The game on the whole moves at a plodding pace, and the slow activation of the jump really comes to be a bother when you encounter enemies, many attacking quickly like the anemone or moving erratically like the starfish. Timing your jump is necessary to get around them but they are placed to be deliberately troublesome rather than serving as interesting challenges. You have a bit of health and the occasional checkpoint so sometimes you can push through them and just take the hits, but once these enemies are swapped in for the more predictable skeletons your enemies are at least using attacks that can’t block your path quite so easily.

Instead, the new annoyance will be your weapon. The game begins with a bit of meandering about the sea floor, the way to progress not entirely clear and finding the way onward feeling almost accidental, but the game does start to show a more overt structure once you get your gun. This gun gives you a way to fight back against some enemies like the pufferfish or skeletons, but certain enemies like the anemone remain untouchable. The problem with the gun is it just doesn’t seem to work properly. Firing it should be a straightforward press of the attack button, but the gun sometimes won’t fire, or it might be delayed and only activate after you’ve turned around to retreat. Sometimes it can rapid fire inexplicably after you hammer the button to get it to work, but never so much that it can become a machine gun since inevitably it will start refusing to function again. Delaying the shots might be part of some effort to make you less powerful, but this doesn’t account for the general issues the gun will experience over the course of the game.

At one point though you get to use a sword instead of your gun, and somehow it is even worse. Slashing with the sword has its own delay problems, and the attack executed when the button is pressed comes in a few varieties that are functionally different but you have no control over. There’s a quick stab that is your best hope, but then there’s a diagonal slash that has less range and is slower to complete, and when you do get to use the sword, it’s part of a combat focused challenge where many enemies come in from all sides. You get a dash attack to get you out of trouble, but this does not really help with getting in close to hurt your enemies, especially when they pack projectile attacks or their own melee options with decent range and speed compared to yours. This section even has a boss fight where he will have support from smaller enemies, projectiles that just seem to fire off when he feels like it rather than in any predictable way, and a few close range attacks that will make it hard to approach. Every boss in the game has a big health bar, so the way I ended up surviving the fight with my minimal health was to luck out when he got stuck on a crate and couldn’t move, whaling on him freely satisfying only because it spared me the trouble of having to deal with his bad design.

Any combat encounter is guaranteed to be disappointing. Probably one of the least offensive is an inexplicable segment where the foe unleashes a bullet rain more fitting a bullet hell shoot ’em up game, this being the only moment in the game to tap on quick and precise movement of such a nature. From there things just get worse though, such as a room where enemies will endlessly respawn until you figure out its gimmick, but they arrive at such a slow pace that it will drag on even if you immediately keen what is necessary to progress. Another boss fight has an excruciatingly slow and simple starting section where the enemy gradually moves back and forth and fires down at you, completely invincible until he comes down to try and ram you. This ramming section requires a perfect use of the slow and floaty jump to get over him during his fast ram so you can lightly damage him and then repeat the process over and over, and since your health is much lower than his, it can be expected to have to do this portion multiple times until you get that jump timing right.

There are times where Deep Ones tries to be dramatic, and while the bosses are often far too slow or difficult for their own good, these dramatic moments can end up so slow or easy they lose all punch. An escape from a giant undersea shark requires you to race off on a seahorse mount, but it’s so easy to navigate the escape tunnel there’s essentially no peril. Later you appear to be fighting a skeleton as it sails off on a vessel firing back at you, but your shots are useless and it’s all about just waiting out an unknown timer until you win. After the very brief mystery at the start that supported simple play, you can only really expect frustration or boring simplicity for the rest of the game, but then there are some other unusual issues to contend with. After being imprisoned by the skeletons, the exploration of their dungeon has platforms that are necessary to climb and sometimes covered with spikes. This could have been a decent enough platforming section if not for the fact that some platforms just disappear for no reason. They are still there, but the game can’t display them properly, their reappearance not always easily triggered. Actual hazards that could work or platforming areas that could be decent otherwise are constantly sabotaged by tedium or technical problems, all while you’re struggling to make the diver move and fight the way you want from him. The easy segments are only a relief because they are a necessary reprieve from the awful gameplay elsewhere.

Deep Ones is definitely a horrifically flawed game, but that can’t take away from how good it looks. Styled to look like a ZX Spectrum title, objects consist mostly of brightly colored outlines with their bodies made up of mostly empty black space, the game able to achieve its retro art style and construct some lovely aquatic backgrounds. The ZX Spectrum style is great for creating vibrant coral reefs and when the game does try to be a bit spooky, the black space in the designs helps to make things seem darker even with the bright outlines. As you progress there is more and more intricate spritework on display, shipwrecks and other undersea structures looking particularly good as you come across them, but all this love put into the visuals is wasted. It doesn’t matter how good something looks if it’s a slog to even get the chance to see it, and Deep Ones is a bit like an art gallery on Mount Everest, except instead of pushing through an incredibly taxing trial to see beautiful works of art, you instead wrestle with a stiff and sloppy game so you can see a neat looking octopus. Deep Ones has a striking aesthetic save when you can see the seams like tentacles that don’t attach to a creature’s main body, but its good looks do not supplement a good experience, the quality just not there to justify tolerating the terrible gameplay to get to the lovely visuals.

THE VERDICT: Deep Ones begins in such a promising manner, its gorgeous ZX Spectrum-inspired art and eerie tone establishing an interesting direction that it completely abandons in favor of an unfocused and deeply flawed experience. Your main means of attack will always be sloppy and hard to use reliably, boss battles are tedious and the controls are not as capable as they need to be to make them fun diversions, and the regular level navigation goes from unclear to uninteresting to downright glitchy over the course of the game. Moments constructed to be tense often end up incredibly dull instead, the moments where things do work properly all too often proving to be too boring to enjoy. Deep Ones can definitely look good at times, but even when it’s not failing in some fundamental way, it never achieves any real success with its gameplay portions.

And so, I give Deep Ones for the Nintendo Switch…

An ATROCIOUS rating. Besides the desire to look like an old ZX Spectrum game, almost no idea the game creators had seems to have been delivered to the player successfully. The horror early on never goes beyond mild creepiness, the game playing its monster hand too early by showing the Lovecraftian horror at the start who is just a generic mass of tentacles with eyes and a mouth. When it moves on to skeleton pirates, everything seems to get worse. The light humor can’t make up for battles that drag on, unresponsive and inconsistent attack methods, and the only real moments of true platforming difficulty ending up sabotaged by the fact your destinations can just poof out of existence for little discernible reason. When something does work like outrunning the shark or skeletons on seahorseback, there’s so little danger that they’re robbed of their dramatic impact. Anything the game decides it wants to try it inevitably messes up either because it can’t put anything interesting into the activity or it completely botches what it was attempting.

The gorgeous pixel art still deserves lauding, but it’s so hard to enjoy the artistry when everything else is a trainwreck. Deeps Ones is sluggish, unfocused, and dabbles in ideas it doesn’t know how to pull off effectively, the art really the only effective part because it’s much harder to mess up. If done properly Deep Ones could have been quite the game, even the shift into silly skeletons possible to pull off if pretty much any gameplay element ever dared to go beyond being passable at best. The moments of more involved activity always fall flat on their face here, meaning that the lovely art style and occasionally passable platforming all end up dragged down into the depths of awfulness with them. Like the light of an anglerfish, don’t let the striking graphics draw you in, for only a terrible fate awaits you in Deep Ones.