The dark abyss of the sea is far from lonely. In the world of Sub-Verge, Divers have settled the deep, shunned by society. And you’re about to drop in for a visit.

This narrative puzzle game, developed by Interactive Tragedy, Limited and published by Pantaloon, sends you plummeting to the ocean’s depths on a mission. Some Divers want to help you. Some want you gone. Only by manipulating the conversation can you reach your goal and escape the tendrils of the horrifying Krake.

The Watery Depths

Sub-Verge begins with your very first choice: Do you side with the Divers or with the Surfacers? If you choose the former, you belong to a group that is allied with outcasted Divers. Your instructions are vague, but you know you must get to the bottom of the sea to the Diver’s base.

Siding with the Surfacers alters your motivation. You’re an expendable resource, harshly cast off as a sacrifice to shoot at the Divers. But again, your exact instructions aren’t clear.

But either way, the result of your allegiance is the same: You’re loaded into a SubVee, which is a round submarine with eight retractable handles around the circumference. The SubVee is dropped into the ocean, plummeting to the bottom.

It’s not long before you encounter the first diver: Etera. This young man is curious and eager to help you back to the surface, assuming you dropped into the sea by accident. For an unexplained reason, you’re not able to speak to Etera, but you can communicate by pushing the SubVee handle next to him. He uses this to grab on and push you back to the Surface.

The SubVee’s ascent is interrupted by a second diver. Drint (who I mistakenly thought was a man the entire game) is a woman that plays by the rules. She makes two things clear: She doesn’t trust you, and she wants to bring you to the Base, where a mysterious individual called “The Mind” will decide what to do with you. 

But here’s the issue: Etera disagrees. He still wants to bring the SubVee up. And thus, you must choose which handle to release: Drint’s or Etera’s?

Up or Down?

The gameplay is all in the SubVee’s handles. You get to choose whose handle is released first. Then, that Diver grabs on and pulls the SubVee either up or down, depending on if they want you at the Base or the Surface. But if the other Divers disagree, the SubVee goes nowhere. All Divers must pull in the same direction, or the SubVee won’t budge. And the Krake is in the prowl, restricting which direction is the “correct” one.

So how do you convince the Divers to get on the same page? The solution lies in which order you release the Divers’ handles. When a Diver receives a handle, it prompts them to speak to the Diver that you chose before them. By steering the conversation, you can uncover the Diver combination that convinces all Divers to swim in the same direction.

Eight’s a Crowd

With two Divers, this puzzle is simple. But your task becomes more complex upon the arrival of Imphrey: the over-controlling Lead Diver that immediately mistrusts the player. Though he’s just as skeptical as Drint, he has the opposite solution: bring the SubVee to the surface, away from the Base. After all, what if the SubVee is a bomb? However, Drint is dedicated to the protocol that dictates they go to “The Mind,” the Base leader that led the Divers to the sea.

Each level in the game takes the player to a different depth, which introduces a new Diver until a total of eight are around the SubVee. This makes the process of finding the correct Diver combination more tedious.

Thankfully, in Normal mode, the history of your past choices is catalogued on the right of the screen. When a Diver is chosen at the correct time (first, second, etc.), they are highlighted in green in the log. In Puzzle mode, the history remains, but my precious green highlights are gone. The history only records the past five moves, so I recommend keeping a physical log if you want to be efficient.

A Deep Conversation

The greatest strength of Sub-Verge is what drew me towards the game in the first place: the dialogue. In order for a game to revolve around a long conversation in the middle of the ocean, the dialogue better be interesting. Sub-Verge does not disappoint in that department.

While I often got stuck in levels testing out different Diver combinations, I found myself hooked on the characters, their differences, and their histories. By the end of the game, we have eight characters, and each of them feel unique. As a writer myself, I know that’s a tough thing to pull off. The characters’ arguments don’t exist for the sake of cheap conflict while the player figures out the puzzle. Each character has their own history that feeds into their opinions of the SubVee, The Mind, and each other. 

On my first run of the game, I thought I had learned everything I could about each Diver. But on my second run, there were entire conversations I uncovered as I experimented with different Diver combinations. The new dialogue altered how I viewed certain characters, which adds replayability to the game.

The Mystery of The Mind

The downside of limiting Sub-Verge to the Diver’s dialogue is that they’re our only source of information about the game world. All we know of the world is that the Surfacers drained parts of the ocean from “the city”, and that the renegade Divers longed for the sea. The man called The Mind led them to freedom in the depths. 

The lack of knowledge makes the early levels of the story confusing. I actually wondered if I had accidentally clicked past a cutscene. Not knowing the context around the Divers and the SubVee left me asking: Which direction do I want to go? Why would I want to go to the Base?

To be completely fair, Sub-Verge has a DLC that helps fill in the gaps. It’s called Subtle Mind, and it’s a prequel novella about The Mind. While it’s only $2.39 on Steam, I believe that information about the game world itself should be available in the base game. Game books are fun, but they should be optional additions to the game, not essential to understanding the story.

A Puzzle of Force

In order to fully enjoy Sub-Verge, I had to accept that it functions better as a visual novel than as a puzzle game. It’s an enjoyable read, but the puzzle of getting the Divers into the correct order was more about brute force than strategy.

Technically, there are “Rules” to logically deduce the order. For example, Imphrey blackmails another Diver into doing whatever he says. This means that whichever direction Imphrey goes, the other Diver will go. But Imphrey must be chosen before the Diver he’s blackmailing. 

These Rules would be great logic tools for finding the puzzle’s solutions…if there were enough of them. The problem is, only a handful of Divers have Rules. While there are nuances in the conversation here and there that helped me guess the correct order, my strategy quickly became the process of elimination. Divers can change their mind midway through a level on which direction they want to go, and the cause is not always clear.

A side effect of brute forcing the combos is that dialogue tends to repeat. Even if I hadn’t exhausted all of the dialogue options, the Divers would occasionally rehash an exchange they just had. This made the otherwise compelling dialogue suddenly feel unnatural.

Fathoming the Fathoms

I’ll say this again: If you’re going to play Sub-Verge, think of it as a visual novel. I cared about these characters by the end. Watching their relationships develop and secrets reveal as a result of my choices kept me hooked the whole game. The art for the characters were beautiful (except the Krake, ew). And the soundscape, while simple, expertly set up the quietly urgent tone.

The concept for the puzzle has promise, but it inhibited the game more than it did enhance it. Which is unfortunate, considering that the only gameplay mechanic is solving the puzzle. If the developer were to make another game with this puzzle, I would recommend leaning harder into the logic Rules. I consider myself fairly decent at logic puzzles, but Sub-Verge’s Rules were few and far between. All of the characters should have at least one Rule, which would still be challenging (in a good way) with 4+ Divers.

All in all, while this game is only 100ish minutes, it shows promise of replayability because of how much dialogue is jam-packed into each level. I still haven’t met my goal of unlocking all achievements, and I’m sure there are more secrets and endings ready to be discovered next time I take the plunge.

Sub-Verge is developed by Interactive Tragedy, Limited and published by Pantaloon. It is available to purchase on Steam and Itch.io for $6.99.