Your objectives are fed to you by Andre, and usually involve reaching a sonar buoy, scanning for important sounds like whale pods or sensor alerts, and checking them out. Ultimately all the story bits give you something to stay plugged into as you swim from one sonar buoy to the next.īeyond Blue consists of eight dives across six different locations, from shallow atolls to deep-sea vents, and even one out in the vast, bottomless open ocean. It’s messy in the way real life is, but not in a gratifying way that games need to be, and ends on an emotional twist that I don’t feel is well-executed or earned.
You’ll have several threads to keep track of, between the sperm whales, Mirai’s family, the friction between her teammates Andre and Irina, and a number of deep-sea mysteries, and they never really come together to form a cohesive narrative. There’s a fair bit of story woven through Beyond Blue, all told through radio chatter as you reach dive checkpoints and use downtime on your sub to make some long-distance calls. And life back on dry land has its own twists and turns, as Mirai deals with her sister Ren and their sick aunt as best she can while thousands of miles away. Her efforts to catalog the undersea world will lead her to some of the deepest places people can dive, on the trail of mysteries that could mean disaster for the fragile aquatic ecosystems. Mirai’s real passion, though, is a pod of sperm whales she’s been following for years, which has a new addition to the group. She’s working with OceanX to produce educational livestreams about life beneath the surface, and also complete research projects for her benefactors. Meet Mirai, a young diver sent to the bottom of the sea in a high-tech one-woman sub. I could certainly complain about the small dive locations or short campaign, but honestly I’ve just been so content swimming around and scanning different fish and jellies that it hardly bothers me. That makes the appearance of something like Beyond Blue a cause for celebration, even if it’s not quite the scope or scale we’re looking for. Despite its runaway success and the more modest successes of titles like Endless Ocean, diving games are few and far between. Subnautica has shown us just how compelling deep dives into mysterious oceans can be, and it wasn’t even the first to explore those depths.