Welcome once again to Explormer of the Week: a feature wherein I play explormers and nothing but explormers. Well, that's probably how it appears by this point—I'm not going to argue that coming up with a new spin on reviewing these things isn't getting as challenging as the developers themselves coming up with new variations. The aquatic, submarine-based Depths of Sanity would appear to be a novel take on the "explore a map and use upgrades to make progress" format... if I hadn't already played so many of these things that I quickly recognized where it may have borrowed a few ideas, namely Aquaria, Song of the Deep, and The Aquatic Adventures of the Last Human. Still, I'm not averse to getting my "Ecco the Dolphin Presents Cask-Strength Thalassophobia" business on, so let's go ahead and frame this game up right.

Depths of Sanity is presented in media res some time after explorer entrepreneur Abraham Douglas is fished out the ocean after his single-minded quest to find out what happened to his company's submarine craft The Baroness and its handpicked crew of five, one of whom was his own son Clay. They had been investigating a "bloop" signal from deep below the ocean's surface before their communication was suddenly cut off, and so Douglas took off in an adaptable mini-submersible to hunt them down. He relays all this to a company therapist after he wakes up, with the player living through his adventure as he tells a dark tale of visual hallucinations, ancient architecture of unknown provenance, monstrously deformed versions of common maritime fauna, and a trail of text and audio logs left behind by the crew that chronicles their unfortunate fates and the moments in their lives that led them there. Douglas himself goes through some shit, to put it mildly, so the game definitely has that "psychologically unravelling hero in the face of inscrutable madness" Lovecraft tone on lock. A natural fit given the themes of the deep ocean being a dark and terrifying place at the best of times.

As you might expect, most of the time you're exploring aquatic locales dealing with unusually large versions of lionfish, sharks, octopuses, pistol shrimps (which are real, but maybe not the "Yosemite S(c)am(pi)" you're picturing), moray eels, and other already-dangerous sea life. As you keep descending, you see new variations of these fish with some gross mutilations and even more dangerous (and occasionally bizarre) attacks to elude. Your craft can move in any direction—there's an alternate control scheme where you simply hold the movement stick to go in that direction, otherwise you're meant to turn with that stick and hit an acceleration button to move in a "tank controls" manner—and most of your weapons tend to only fire in the direction you're facing. Upgrades include a light for dark areas, hull upgrades that reduce damage or allow for harsher environmental conditions, multiple weapon firing types, torpedoes and depth charges for alternative firepower sources, and a handy little Castlevania backdash thing that is more useful than it first appears. The map tech is fairly basic but it does highlight doors with colors relating to what they need to be opened (a red line indicates an explosive you need to detonate with the right weapon in order to open the passageway, for instance), and the game offers a fair number of fast travel nodes (though it takes a while to unlock them) and save points. Survival is pretty easy outside of boss fights, as most enemies can be safely avoided; they only ever drop health and ammo refills, and even then only sparingly, so if you can avoid them it's best to do so. Some of the more persistent types will get in the way of any investigating though, so those can get fried and added to the menu at Red Lobster for all I care. You can also leave the sub Blaster Master style to explore narrower passageways, and these present their own dangers as you keep in mind your limited oxygen and a very vulnerable one-hit death status outside of the protective hull of the sub.

Overall the gameplay's been pretty standard for one of these, with no particular exceptional characteristics beyond the slightly uncommon submarine/aquatic aspect. If the game stands out at all it's for leaning on that unsettling deep sea atmosphere and the way things get ever darker—both figuratively and literally—as you continue to sink further than any man has been before. The regular influx of logs as they get ever more bleak and distressing, the protagonist's own fracturing mind as he starts to hallucinate that his onboard computer is his dead wife (I suppose this is a Solaris reference, but I can't help but think of Samus and Adam's little chats in Metroid Fusion), some honest-to-goodness body horror as the entity down here communicates to Abe through his employees' waterlogged corpses, and just the way the environment itself appears to be growing more hostile and alien with every vertical kilometer descended. It's been some effective slow-burn horror so far, only slightly let down by the game's MS Paint-friendly graphics (whatever, it's better than anything I could muster up). Decent use of sound design too, though sadly the audio logs aren't voiced.

I'm close to the end of the game as I write this—I just entered a thriving biodiverse graveyard of whale carcasses, which is a real thing called a whale fall, but the wiki article doesn't tell you just how gooey these places are close up—and I've been making notes of where to backtrack to once I sweep up the last of the upgrades. The highlights so far, besides the grim storytelling, have been the boss fights: I've narrowly beaten them all on the first attempt, which to me is perfect boss difficulty. Nothing like walking away from a tough fight through the narrowest of margins without having to suffer the ignominy of having to start over after one too many bumps. They can be a bit long and beholden to patterns where it's hard to damage them for a while, but they work within the confines of your limited movement set: it's not like you could reasonably expect to walk away from a full on danmaku battle with how deliberately the sub moves around, but these boss patterns do give you a moment to get your butt in gear and avoid telegraphed attacks. As an overall package Depths of Sanity been pretty solid despite the evident low-budget feel, and I look forward to seeing how much worse everything gets for these doomed sailors. I just looove misery, I dunno what to tell you.

Rating: 4 out of 5.