Exploring the: Full Fathom demo
Delve deep in the ocean in your rusted submarine.
Developer and publisher: DÆMON House
Full Fathom is a survival game set under the sea, where the player pilots and maintains a rusted submarine by themselves and is forced to venture off for food and materials to keep themselves, and the submarine, functional. From the demo, it seems that you’re trying to figure out what happened to the group of researchers during an incident in 1991, and everything that entails.
Above The Surface
The room looks spacious, but only because the middle is empty and everything else is pushed to the opposite corners of the room. One of the ceiling tiles lights up, enough to shine the entire room, leaving the broken one only noticeable because of its worthlessness. The reinforced window is being pelted by incessant rain, with thunder occasionally flowing with its blows.
The four rows of bookshelf to your right have binders, crates, and boxes, cluttered with other abandoned items that make you wonder about their purpose there, as if they’re there to fill space and nothing else. To the left of the bookshelf is a lonely chair, tightly hugging the corner and close to the window, on an angle that could be used to look out of the window.
To your left looks like a work area. There’s a brown pegboard with a long floating shelf on the top that touches both ends of the corner, carrying boxes and crates, spaced evenly with 2 other floating shelves that only cover a quarter of the pegboard that carry more binders and VHS boxes. Right below them is a long table, just as long as the top shelf, with scattered items below it, papers and binders, and a box and other items on top, but there’s also a clean-looking television on top of a VHS player.
Directly to the left of the work area is a small square metal hole in the wall that, with the press of a button, causes a flash that wipes tapes and other electrical devices. To the left of that is a corkboard with a flyer that reads, “Memory Troubles?”
When interacting with it, it tells you of VHS tapes that were found on a hermetic trunk on the coast of Kagoshima, Japan, that was then discovered that it had belonged to a Harvard IOA research group that went missing following the Eurasian Incident. The strange results from these findings classified these items as anomalous evidence related to the incident that occurred in 1991. Here, your goal is revealed to you, review these restored tapes and find out what happened.
You hear a rumbling sound coming from the chute, and once you pull the lever, it reveals a VHS tape with “GRAVEVIEW” on the side. Inserting the tape into the VHS player turns the television on, loads the tape, and begins the game.
An Atmosphere You Can’t Fathom
You’re now, presumably, one of the researchers from the restored tapes, like a found-footage film, even with the resolution and the date, and time on the HUD. Without anything said to you, except the helpful hints and advice from Willy, you have to find out what to do, what items do what, how the buttons function, and overall, how the rundown and rust-covered submarine that’s keeping you alive works.
With limited resources already available in your submarine, as well as missing pieces, you’re advised, and cautioned, to venture out into the sea to scavenge for rations, materials, and anything else that can help you accomplish the mission, which in this demo is to exit the region by reaching 712.
Logically, it’s useful to grow an understanding of your work area. With 8 important rooms, each with its own importance, though the bunk room is not available in the demo, and 3 halls, familiarizing yourself with the space and utility of each room is essential, especially when flooding and damages can occur, requiring the player’s swift reaction and repairs to be executed.
But the inside of the submarine is rusted, and looks just as scary, if not more, than the outside. Each hall is tight, and when a disaster occurs, gives you limited space to react, and worse if they can only depend on their flashlight.
But once you understand your tasks, which are displayed in your task menu, and have your inventory, which is similar to RE4’s inventory, all set up from picking up items from the storage, you can set out to the gloomy sea.
Although it’s important to note that, while the team behind this game has said that they wanted to avoid handholding (telling the player how everything works), I did not feel lost. It took me some time to figure out how the submarine, inventory, and other things function, Willy greatly helped me while still giving me space to figure out things on my own. That being said, someone who isn’t open to exploring themselves will certainly be against this direction.
Outside The Rusted Haven
The outside is filled with structures of what seems to be a present civilization that became the past. Though, it’s not clear how this happened, and raises questions as the demo starts you in a normal apartment, it’s clear that part of the mystery is finding out why this happened.
Through letters found as you venture through the sea, you’re able to piece together what was happening at the time. When it comes down to how the game plays, it’s fairly familiar to other survival games, except for the base crafting and such.
When you’re not in the submarine, you’re at the mercy of the sea, meaning you have to be careful not only of dangerous creatures, including some that camouflage themselves under the sand but of your oxygen that can run out. Of course, you can find oxygen tanks, or take some with you in the inventory, but you have to be wary as it can quickly run out. While swimming through the rundown city, you can find food, materials, and anything else needed to survive, but because this is what you’re doing the most, your oxygen runs out fairly quickly and will have you swimming back to your submarine frequently if you can’t find any oxygen around the sea. The swimming fast is a little odd, as you have to hit the sprint button as your character pushes their arms. While I did get used to it, I could see it bothering some people.
Can You Fathom?
The Full Fathom demo only gives us a glimpse of what’s to come, promising a gloomy and dreadful atmosphere that makes your safe haven a rusted cage susceptible to outside dangers, if not careful, and a horrifying mystery of an ocean that swallowed a city. While it plays like your average survival game, the atmosphere and submarine upkeep is something that needs to be experienced.