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There’s “clear corruption” throughout this world, and the sea is thick with terrifying beasts. Kay finds herself separated from the other girl, but can now use one of her abilities, a fire flare, to point herself in the right direction.
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In the demo, darkness eventually creeps back in when danger is near. Geppert took her relationship woes, her mental health struggles, and her desire to make more meaningful, artful experiences and channeled them into what eventually became Sea of Solitude. That same year, Jo-Mei Games received enough funding to wrap up their free-to-play efforts and create something independent.
Sea of solitude 2019 professional#
With microtransactions you need to build everything around the core mechanic.”īy 2014, struggling with these personal and professional crises, Geppert was ready for a change. “We had a publisher and the contract forever so we could make nothing and still get money. Business was good, but there wasn’t much creative freedom. When Geppert founded Jo-Mei Games with co-CEO Boris Munser in 2009, the studio did a lot of contract work, creating game concepts for publishers.
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“I've always wanted to make art games, story-heavy games, but you cannot really do that with free-to-play games,” she said. But there’s another source of inspiration as well: Geppert’s desire to break out of the “golden cage” of making free-to-play games in order to design something completely different. The symbolism is heavy you don’t need to know Geppert’s background to understand that it’s about a woman wrestling with some very dark feelings of despair and hopelessness. The sea is a gorgeous green, the sky is clear blue, and the water level drops to reveal more of the surrounding architecture. Soon the sun comes out again, and the world isn’t so dark. It’s a scary, empty world, and clearly dangerous not the sort of place one would want to traverse alone.Īs Kay laments her situation, another girl appears, one whose emanating brightness is in stark contrast to Kay’s ghastly form. Looking like a creature of the dark herself, she’s found herself lost in a submerged town loosely based on Geppert’s home city of Berlin. We don’t know much about Kay, but her intense loneliness is palpable in the demo. Sea of Solitude’s stunning art design uses the juxtaposition of bright colors and near-total darkness to tell the story of a young woman named Kay, also voiced by Jud. She took us through one of the first live demos of Sea of Solitude, talking about its “most personal story” as lead animator Miriam Jud played the game. It is frightening and tense every time you have to enter the water.“I'm always like an open book,” Geppert told GameDaily earlier this month at the EA Play event in downtown Los Angeles. Timing your swimming with how far away the monster is will be absolutely imperative to your survival some of the gaps you need to cover provide only a moment of grace before it is right behind you and quickly consumes you whole. Kay’s boat handles nicely on the water and rocks with the waves, and her ability to jump is quite impressive, making for a few tense moments where you aren’t quite sure if you will make it. Much like the original, getting around the world is easy. You want to explore more, check every corner, any excuse to stay in the light just a little longer before having to delve into the darkness where nightmares try to devour you, hands reach out from the depths to pull you below the surface, and dozens of voices taunt and insult you to tell you how pathetic and weak you are. After extended periods of navigating the darkness and finding your way into the light, Sea of Solitude makes you cling to these brief interludes of happiness. As noted with the original, the gameplay mechanics themselves are fairly basic and rudimentary, but this isn’t a game you come to for a complex array of gameplay features, rather the incredible narrative that drives right to the heart during every moment of play.