I’m looking for something. I don’t know what it is, but I have to find it, and my map tells me it’s here. I’ve circled a deliberately empty room, desperately searching every nook and cranny in case it’s hiding by the fireplace, or in an antique globe. But it isn’t. Suddenly, I realize how long I’ve spent not paying attention behind me, and I snap my eyes to the door I came in through.
It was open, and outside was an ocean that flooded the chambers of the sunken ship I had been searching for in the cabin. No one had ever looked at me, but for a moment I was absolutely sure that someone was watching me. What I was looking for was right there on the balcony above me. I could not find it for the time being.
Manage Cookie Settings
It took me a little while to really understand Thalassa: Edge of the Abyss, the latest game from Norwegian indie studio Sarepta Studio. But once I did, I was hooked. The game wraps you in an early 20th century diving suit as you explore the wreck of the SS Thalassa. The ship sank under mysterious circumstances shortly after the protagonist and the man overseeing the dive went on shore leave following a fatal accident that claimed the life of one of their crew members.
The task that awaits you at the ship’s final resting place is simple. Just figure out what happened so their families – and you – can get some comfort. You play as a lone underwater detective, searching the flooded and damaged rooms and sections of an early 20th century private liner designed to allow its wealthy owner, Isabel Greenwood, to fulfill her archaeological dream of salvaging a Spanish galleon from the deep, finding notes, objects, and wax recordings to help you piece things together. You might immediately compare it to Lucas Pope’s Return of the Obra Dinn (and I certainly did when I initially tried the game’s Steam next fest demo).
While I’m surprised the two games don’t share at least some common inspiration, I think Thalassa’s less stylized focus than other very good games, and more focused on the deep personal connections between its protagonists and the lost souls they’re digging and sifting through, is enough to make it stand out. Your biggest focus isn’t trying to nail down simple details like putting names to faces before you get too deep into the story – the context is what matters most from the beginning. Why is this happening to someone I know and care about?
It’s more in-your-face heckling than the usually rather subtle Obra Dinn, which isn’t a bad thing. In fact, the only area where I think Thalassa might lag behind its spiritual brother is in not making more use of its historical context as an unshakable and defining element of its characters.
As you’d expect, given the subject matter, it’s this sentiment that adds substance to Thalassa’s gameplay, which consists of exploration or crime scene walk simulations and puzzle solving via menus that require you to plug all the evidence you’ve collected into the gaps that connect different scenes. If you’re a particularly fast-moving Inspector Clouseau, you might find both of these a bit slow and laborious, but that fits in nicely with the story Thalassa is telling.
You should take time to appreciate the otherworldly beauty of the dwellings that people have recently called home, gradually rusting and crumbling, fish swimming gently in and out of their broken windows and nailed-down doors. You should not rest until you have sorted out every detail of the events, the essential gist of which is clear to the eye. You should take time to reflect, as the voices of several of your crewmates echo through your mind, reacting to your findings and offering their thoughts.
While I can’t go into too much detail about how certain characters and performances give the complex themes explored in Tarassa the punch they deserve without getting into spoilers, I’ll just say this: survivor’s guilt is front and center, and the game handles it very deftly for the most part, truly putting you in the shoes of someone stuck in a helpless cycle of regret and sadness that keeps them constantly forced to dwell on what they’ve lost.
Baldur’s Gate 3’s voice actors Emilia Taylor and Peter Hannah, who play Alex and Bailey respectively, shoulder the heaviest performances, both delivering excellent dialogue, and while other aspects of the game may be a bit wooden, their performances are very impressive when it matters most. At certain key moments in the plot, the protagonists are caught in dreamlike scenes, and without excellent voice acting, it would have been difficult for them to pull off these scenes while maintaining the overall serious tone of the game.
Aside from those two, I didn’t think there were any weak links in the characters, with everyone getting enough screen time and depth to play their part in the plot and enough interesting connections to the rest of the crew to make them feel like a real, well-developed group. No one felt like they were abandoned on an island, were superfluous, or didn’t have at least one flaw or trait to make them interesting, which is hard to achieve in a game with a relatively tight runtime.
In terms of tone, it’s a similar formula, and I think Sarepta has done a good job of building on the success of My Child: Lebensborn by digging into complex and disturbing themes while making sure it still provides a sufficiently entertaining experience this time around. That being said, if you’re making a game like this, you’re obviously not going to go the route of a laugh-filled, high-energy action game, so if some weird and hilarious work of black magic is populating the “Fortnite-like games” section of your store of choice, I’d probably skip this one.
I can’t really talk about the climax of the game’s narrative because that would involve spoilers, as always, but to summarize – Tarassa’s story only gets better with time.
There are a few moments, both before you get going and before you really get sucked into the finale, where the flow can get a little shaky—or, in the latter case, it can stall without explicitly telling you why if you haven’t solved nearly all of the mysteries—but for the most part, she sails smoothly enough to let you be swept along by her wave. Once you reach the conclusion, no matter what choice you make at the end, you’ll be treated to an ending that feels just right and complements the story being told.
If all of the above sounds like what you want from a game, I’d say you’ve found what you were looking for.
Thalassa: Edge of the Abyss released August 1, 2024and will be available on PC. This review was conducted on PC with a code provided by the publisher.
