The UFO 50 Diaries: Divers
They should have called it Get Killed by Piranhas Simulator
The first thing you might notice when firing up Divers is the silence. As you swim down into the inky black depths of this primeval oceanic chasm, not even the rush of water around your limbs can be heard. It's incredibly disconcerting, made more so by the sudden bursts of sound that occur whenever an enemy decides to dart towards you.
Much of the rest of the game is a surprising cacophony; combat an angry clash of chiptune beats and astringent sound effects; the deafening bloops of projectile flinging anenomes; the comforting-if-disconcerting noise of the ocean waves as you transition into new and terrifying locations.
Its the complete absence of noise in those opening moments, however, tha is the thing that has been drilled into the back of my head as I explored this hostile, maze-like realm.
Divers is an extremely unusual RPG for a number of reasons. You have one goal, reach the depths, everything else is there to get in your way.
Each run opens with a trio of menu options: a storefront, an equipment screen and a launch into the unknown. You can’t afford anything in the shop at first, there are no loadout options for equipment, all you can do is venture forth.
Combat is brutal, with enemies hitting hard, dropping your health to zero in a matter of minutes if you’re not careful. Eccentric circles of this brutality get increasingly deadly the further out you venture, and obviously this is a problem because that’s where all the good shit is hidden.
The map is obscured, requiring a specific degree of recall not only to navigate these treacherous waters but also to make it back to your base camp, where a hearty meal and a good night’s sleep not only cures what ails you, but also saves your progress.
Maybe after surviving a few fights you’ll have yourself a level up, maybe enough cash to buy up some new gear. Maybe not, rewards are frugal and not very forthcoming, in order to win big you have to go deeper, risk more.
This is the second thing I noticed about Divers. It’s an awful lot like Porgy in many regards, sharing that same loop of exploration, planning and execution in order to make some tangible progress.
It's better than Porgy in my eyes because there’s no fuel meter, so as long as you can avoid enemies and keep your health intact you can swim forever. But beyond that, through exploration, the unlocking of shortcuts and the discovery of unexplained items in the world that contribute to your ability to upgrade your equipment, and the fact that dying resets all your progress back to the last point you surfaced for air…
This is a soulslike, isn’t it?
An actual soulslike, taking the design principles, the esoterica and the webbed map design of Fromsoft’s flagship franchise and not just the brutal difficulty and tedious lore. Its almost refreshing to see that in order to move forward with the genre, we’ve had to go back.
Many years ago, after getting really into Bloodborne, I had thought a lot about that game’s use of concentric map design in its opening area, how surviving every pathway to its final destination brought you back to the same lamp checkpoint.
Such a sophisticated way to make the city feel enormous but at the same time like it wasn’t just some unhinged architectural nightmare, that these streets did exist in relation to one another.
I had mused about what a Souls game would look like if there was only one bonfire in the entire world, how would progression exist in that space, how would it inform the map design?
While I don’t think Divers’ map is all that sophisticated (it's not the point of it, and wouldn’t be in keeping with the in-universe canon), I did appreciate what having this solitary checkpoint did for my thought processes as I navigated.
Not just diving deeper into the ocean, the fact that the map spreads out orthogonally as well, indicating clearly that you can’t simply rush to your goal at the seabed avoiding everything about the game in the process. Although, as I imagine some real UFO 50 sickos have attempted, you probably can if you familiarise yourself with the map enough.
A cool little experience, beyond the classic challenge of just trying to figure out what everything does, it's also quite satisfying in the traditional JRPG sense of grinding out levels and cash, clearly with an upper limit to what you can achieve without that riskier exploration thanks to how stronger weapons have additional item requirements to purchase.
Wading around in the shallows is nice, but eventually you will have to go into the depths.