"One thing that every gamer, young and old, can probably agree on is that water levels in video games are usually pretty bad. Now of course there are games that nail this concept, especially ones that take place entirely underwater, but that’s not what this video is about! Today I'm looking at a handful of the most memorable water levels in gaming! These aren't necessarily my favorites or the ones I dislike the most, but ones that stuck with me for better or worse.
"Gamplay by Mike Matei and Sean O'Rourke
"NOTE: In Sonic 1, we mistook the Shield for the Bubble Shield from Sonic 3 - we thought they did the same thing while making the video."
I've always had a thing for underwater levels/areas in games. I did a whole "
Game Music Thing" post about
underwater levels over a decade ago, after all.[1] (Though yeah, aside from the music, I too wasn't that big of a fan of that crashed frigate level in
Metroid Prime, even if I may have given it at least a bit of a pass just for being an underwater level.)
Aside from the ones mentioned in that post, I'd also like to mention a few other more recent ones I've played (more recent than 2011, anyway), such as
Subnautica and its
Below Zero sequel,
FarSky[2],
Abzû,
Beyond Blue, and
The Aquatic Adventure of the Last Human. I'm mostly a fan of games like that (and
Aquaria and
Ecco as mentioned in the previous post) where the entire game takes place mostly underwater. I don't really count games like
BioShock or whatever, though, since in those games, while you are
technically underwater the whole time, the setting of the game could have taken place on land or in space or wherever, and not all that much would have changed. I'm talking about games where you're out and about in the actual water, most of the time.
Beyond that, there were planets in
Starbound that were almost entirely ocean (usually with an underwater city or two on the seabed somewhere). There are also oceanic planets in
No Man's Sky, but they're not too impressively deep or anything, which is a bit of a bummer. And, of course, there are the water areas in games like
Bloodstained and other Metroidvanias that I've played (there are almost always some underwater areas in Metroidvania games).
Hell, there was even that underwater tower made of glass that I built in
Minecraft on the server that
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
owsf2000 and I use to play on. (For all I know, it might be still there, though I haven't played on that server in years.)
There are
quite a few more such games that I haven't played myself.
Weird thing is that while I'm a big fan of underwater games and underwater levels in games, I have
no desire whatsoever to be underwater in real life, outside of baby stuff like swimming pools or a shallow creek or lake or something. (And even then, it's been probably at least two decades since the last time I was in a swimming pool or whatever.) I guess that's why I like the games so much, as they let you do stuff that you'd never do in real life, especially in cases like this.
[1] - And, as is annoyingly the case whenever I go back and look at those old "Game Music Thing" posts, I had to replace a few of the embeds in that post, due to the previous videos having died, for whatever reasons. And, once I finish this here post, I'm going to feel compelled to go and look at all the
other posts in that tag and fix the embeds in those, as well, as I'm sure that the underwater one isn't the only one with broken embeds in it. (EDIT) Not tonight, Satan, ha ha ha. (/EDIT)
[2] - While
FarSky is no longer available on Steam, as I only just found out (and I was about to write something here lamenting that), I found out via the Steam forums that
it is available for free on itch.io. (Same for
The Free Ones, for that matter, though that's not a game I've played myself yet. Their third game,
Sky Break, is not available anywhere, as far as I can tell, and the developer apparently
has no plans to release it for free on itch. That's another one I haven't played [or even heard of, prior to now].)
