The ocean is dangerous. The ocean is dark and full of mysteries. Mankind has known that for a long time, but some people still don’t want to hear it. So that you don’t have to pay exorbitant amounts of money to find out the hard way, we have decided to make a selection of some of the best games that take place under the sea or that take place directly inside submarines. Because we understand that these days tasalophobia and morbidity are going to hit many people hard, so, at least, let’s take the opportunity to play good games.
Barotrauma
Operating a submarine requires many people working together and Barotrauma takes care of letting us know it in absolutely every step we try to take in this intense game for between two and sixteen people. Probably the most acclaimed cooperative game of all those that have come out in recent times, our purpose is to investigate the mysterious oceans of Europara while we complete missions on a procedurally generated map and try to keep the submarine running while the ocean, and everything that inhabits it, puts us all the problems you can imagine.
Launching on June 5, 2019 in early access, having its official release on March 13 of this same year, this game by FakeFish and Undertow Games is the perfect mix between survival game and cooperative game. A video game that never allows us to be calm, always trying to predict what is the next thing that will try to kill us down there.
Iron Lung
The earth is uninhabitable. There are no resources in the unknown universe. You are a prisoner who will never see the sunlight again. You are given a proposition. If you agree to investigate an ocean of blood on a desolate moon in a tiny rusty submarine with no windows and all the doors welded shut, you will achieve your freedom. If you make it back alive. Knowing that you’re not going to make it out of where you are alive anyway, at least on the Iron Lung, the name of that submarine, it sounds like you have a chance of survival.
Released on March 10, 2022, Iron Lung is a game designed by David Szymanski available for Nintendo Switch and Microsoft Windows. The game is dark, distressing and deeply sinister. Even if all we can see takes place in literally two square meters, we have to move for hundreds of miles blindly, in an ocean of blood, while we hear our submarine slowly unraveling and hear strange things out there. You thought there was nothing worse than prison? Welcome to Iron Lung.
Subnautica
Sometimes surviving in the ocean doesn’t have to be absolutely terrifying, it can just be fraught with tension and the need to think carefully about what we need to do at any given moment to keep moving forward. That’s what happens with Subnautica. Created by Unknown Worlds Entertainment and published on January 23, 2018, it is a seabed exploration game where we will have to collect resources, establish bases and above all, be careful not to be devoured by hostile fauna or end up running out of resources to be able to continue advancing.
Much less dark than most of the games on this list, very focused on the playable loop, Subnautica could be considered in a way the underwater equivalent of No Man’s Sky. A game based on exploration, careful and quiet progress, that may not put huge threats in front of us on a regular basis, but never leaves us without clear purposes to keep moving forward.
Maneater
Changing the subject completely, how about for once we about the danger that lurks under the sea? That’s what Maneater proposes, a game developed by Tripwire Interactive that, inspired by Steven Spielberg’s movie Jaws, puts us in the shoes of a female bull shark from conception until she can finally take revenge on the fisherman who disfigured her when she was a pup and killed her mother.
In Maneater we will have to go through all the stages of a shark’s life. Starting with hunting small fish, graduating to hunting larger prey, to finally terrorize humans and end up with fishermen looking to turn us into trophies. Just because it doesn’t work that way in reality, doesn’t mean that this shark GTA isn’t completely realistic to what fiction has told us about sharks. And for that we curse you, Spielberg – sharks really are good buddies!
Bioshock
Few games are more mythical than BioShock if we talk about games that take place underwater. Even less if we talk about games that take place underwater because of millionaires who make absolutely terrible decisions by ignoring common sense and wanting to avoid listening to experts and having to listen to government decisions. Because BioShock is about Rapture, a city under the ocean, which should be a utopia created for the most brilliant people in the world and has ended up being a dystopia where there is only death and madness.
While it might seem that BioShock is probably that kind of game that hasn’t aged well, the reality is that it has stood the test of time incredibly well. Both its first and second parts hold up to this day as a good pair of games and can be played and celebrated as intelligent and interesting, even by our canons. Sadly, the present day has shown us that the rich are capable of doing absolutely absurd things like Rapture, but if we have to take something good out of it, at least let it be that we play one of these games.
Some of the links added in the article are part of affiliate campaigns and may represent benefits for Softonic.
