Here there be spoilers


If you're excited to be the xenobiologist making discoveries on an alien world, or as the game advertises "become the xenobiologist," that expectation should be tempered up-front. You're something of a passenger on this expedition and at most a makeshift research assistant. Ellery Vas makes the observations, speculates about species behavior, analyzes samples, makes inferences from data, and draws up a sketch for you to view. You navigate the suit around and tactically deploy, load, or take Gliese 667Cc samples here and there. The experience is mostly reading and imagining. The game is ecosystem lore unfurled to you at a steady, yet occasionally thrilling pace, by an overqualified colleague in the field or yourself in the lab via notes furnished by Vas. It evokes a sense of wonder and tickles the imagination like it should, but despite your arrangement mirroring the mutualism as the core idea of the game no small part of me wants the same experience as the lead researcher. I'm unsure if this is a personal defect or legitimate want.

While many species share ostensible characteristics to life on earth their ecological roles are often communicatively mutualistic or even resemble collectivist structure. The ability of the Artificers to freely manipulate genomes and transcriptomes permits life to be infinitely transformed, rendered as products of calculation or experience rather than the randomness in natural selection alone . Lysenkoism is vindicated at last! You only need to be a god to make it work. The wonderful, novel, and even placid ecology of Gliese 667Cc couldn't exist without an engineered mutualism that can outlive its designers. In Other Waters is an edenic vision of collectivism taken to a naturalistic extreme.


I had trouble with the characters, though. The relationship between you and Vas is altogether too barebones to sell the storepage blurb. Ellery Vas doesn't quite feel like a fully-fledged person, and I felt I at-best had a relationship of necessary convenience with her rather than actually electing to guide her. Vas trusts me because "I kept her safe" and "guided" her of my own volition as a free act, showing that I'm trustworthy. I have neither the heart nor the ability to confess that was mostly just the game. I initially had some... technical questions about what state of my passenger would suffice to function but you're going to be in a mutualistic relationship come hell or... Gliese 667Cc. You're part of this game's vision but not its ultimate focus, which can (and I think did) grate on people's expectations, including mine. Modern games are written with the player's satisfaction first and foremost, particularly in the way they cater to your sense of self-importance and often a heroic or even messianic agency. This wouldn't fit with a mutualist narrative, though, which demands equal recognition and an even servicing of needs. The feeling of being between a second and third wheel is intentional and the vision of the whole benefits from it. However, feeling like an accessory to events larger than any individual and feeling like an accessory to someone else's particular story are very different experiences. The first half especially feels like the player is an accessory to Vas rather than a peer, sometimes even subordinate to her will rather than in a mutualistic relationship, despite it being alleged narratively. If mutualism requires an equal and complementary servicing of needs you need a voice to represent your needs too, no? It wouldn't be unreasonable for Vas to scrounge up a dialogue module (though it might be for solo development).


When you see beauty in desolation you can see when other people ape it too. Annihilation happens to be my favorite book and the tell-tale signs were there of it inspiring the developer: a biologist disappearing into the landscape (figuratively in Ellery's case, literally in Minae's case ), an emphasis on ecological reclamation and humanity changing to survive (almost an imperative to the posthuman). What doesn't feature is an angsty meditation on subjectivity and the obfuscation of the external world from it, about the discomfort with one's own incommensurability with objective truth. Area X might be a strange-fictional place, but it's a beacon illuminating real epistemic problems we face. That epistemic angst is central to the Southern Reach Trilogy: the attempt to annihilate the barrier with a so-called "objective method," to try asserting authority over it by systematizing and centralizing its study or at best making a terroir of it, then finally accepting it, surrendering human control and acknowledging the strange as the source of ecstatic wonder in the world, and through this evolving into something else. It's something I haven't seen represented so well in any other art but which feels deeply personal. In Other Waters takes an eye from the Southern Reach trilogy, but its the soul beyond it which is truly compelling.


I might sound too critical of this game to recommend it, but I increasingly find myself playing games to think about them rather than enjoying play itself. This game inspired my thinking and clarified my disposition towards other art I love. That made it well worth my time.