We are straining Rock Paper Shotgun’s innovative “News To Me, Anyway” subcategory to breaking point with Anoxic Depths: Caves Of The Yendori, a turn-based spelunking roguelite from Studio Tectorum. The scurvy bean-counters among you might protest that it came out 10 years ago, possibly before some of you were old enough to read, operate video games, or count beans. To you scurvy bean-counters I would say: if you’re going to be so picky about details, how about you help me remember which way is up, because I am stuck in an underwater cave.
I have maybe 12 breaths left in my oxygen cylinder, and all I can see is rock texture. The ladder to the surface could be a foot away or 20. Soon, my body shall join those of the divers who came before. Ye gods, I love being this confused in video games.
Anoxic Depths offers “3D gameplay in a 2D world”, to which the only appropriate response is surely “you magnificent bastards, get the hell in here and also, get the hell out, I never want to see your face again”. It casts you as a diver fetching bones, pottery and amulets from procedurally generated underground lakes, at the request of a mysterious researcher.
The researcher “is not a cave diving instructor”, the developer’s official website cautions, which is presumably why there is no tutorial in the demo, just sparse hints from NPCs in the shops and dwellings around the cavemouth. I would appreciate a tutorial, in that Anoxic Depths simulates “decompression sickness” and “pulmonary barotrauma”, and I don’t quite know what either of these are. But before I can get pulmonary barotrauma, I need to master the art of descending through a world that appears flat.
As with Dwarf Fortress, Anoxic Depths deals out its geography in cross-sections. Unlike in Dwarf Fortress, you can roll the view by 90 degree increments, turning a horizontal cross-section into a vertical one. There is no HUD indication of your orientation by default, so you have to really build up a mental map of the volume you’re exploring, and count the number of times you’ve rolled. There are gear items such as diving lines to help you retrace your path to the surface. While we’re talking gear, don’t forget to switch on your breathing apparatus before you plunge in.
As and when you’ve got your head round these things, you can try playing the game with a kanji tileset or ASCII, if you want to really layer up the Dwarf Fortress comparisons. Are there any Dwarf Fortress-style procedural demons below? I’ve yet to encounter one and I sincerely hope not. Imagine trying to elude a Forgotten Beast when you can’t remember which way is up.
Thanks to Resetera user Toma for passing this on. You can try the demo for yourself on Itch.io. It limits how deep you can dive, but saves do carry over to the full game, which will set you back by around the price of a posh supermarket sandwich. For an even more confuzzling take on video game swimming, try Water Level/b.l.u.e. EXPLORATION.
