Under the Sea Winds

Parenthood is a joy, but an adjunct fact about having a toddler is that your memory is completely shot. So I know that a couple of months ago, I was reading about – or maybe having a conversation about? And actually maybe it was like a year and a bit ago? At a museum or aquarium? – anyway I was in some manner engaging with the fact that major elements of the eel reproductive cycle remained mysterious until just a few decades ago, and there are still some holes in our present understanding. But the details, as the preceding sentence perhaps would indicate, remained fuzzy. So I was sincerely delighted to come across Under the Sea Wind, which is a 1980s-set period piece – apparently based on a Rachel Carson short story – about a scientist traveling the world on a quest to unravel the secrets of eel spawning. It’s a debut game that’s gotten a lot less testing than it needed, but the rough patches can’t take away from the obvious enthusiasm it radiates; it refreshed my store of eel facts just when I needed it.

Structurally, the game’s arranged as a series of vignettes as you move from location to location; you start in Scandinavia, investigating one of the world’s oldest eels (150 so years of age!), then go to Bermuda to collect samples at sea and on land. Gameplay changes up a bit between the segments, with your lab notebook providing specific goals an even some helpful syntax for more unique command; the Sweden segment involves some traditional medium dry goods puzzles, while the oceangoing bit involves a bit of map-reading and a navigation puzzle, and the extend finale requires meticulous exploration. None of them are especially involved or novel, but the variety is nice, and I certainly found that having a scientific objective in view helped make the challenges feel more organic and satisfying to solve. There are some funny lines, too – I enjoyed a part where you need to enlist some youthful help, because at a key moment a boy " possesses the necessary verbs to fashion a fishing rod", and you don’t (the cover art, by the author’s 8 year old kid, is also adorable).

With that said, there’s definitely some tricky sailing along the way. Under the Sea Winds is an Adventuron game, and doesn’t do much to mitigate that system’s parser idiosyncrasies – there are few synonyms (I got hung up for a long time because I hadn’t noticed that PUSH BUTTON wasn’t the same as PRESS BUTTON), the game often pretends to understand actions that it’s actually unable to parse, and movable objects sometimes go unmentioned in room descriptions – while adding a few more bugs besides. Notably, I couldn’t get the save function to work, which is an issue since the game does announce that it’s Nasty on the Zarfian scale for one particular sequence, and in once case an incorrect description made me misunderstand a puzzle <spoiler(the well always displays as 2/3 full, so I wasn’t sure why I needed to fill it with additional water)Bespeaking what appears to have been limited testing, there are a reasonable number of typos, and the generally-easy puzzles tend to be either way overclued or way underclued; the notebook spells out much of what you need to do, but I didn’t see any direct indication of where in the ocean I had to go to collect a sample, for example. Meanwhile, many are implemented in a finicky way that seems to assume you’ll solve them in exactly the order the author intends, even when that doesn’t make sense – for example, in an early puzzle the game won’t let you turn on a hose until you’re carrying an item that can contain water, despite the fact that you’d need to drop the container at a neighboring location to actually be useful.

Still, I managed to muddle through, admittedly sometimes with the help of the walkthrough (which is provided only in video work – why, God, why?). And I’m glad I did, because the game provides an experience like no other; it definitely can get zany, with its Rube-Goldberg puzzle solutions and a magic flying eel haunting your dreams whose origins and agenda go unrevealed, but the steady drip of info on exactly how odd eels are, alongside the novelty of solving puzzles to advance science rather than just amass more inventory objects and treasure, makes me happy to have played Under the Sea Winds, and hopefully armed with more data the next time my son asks me awkward questions about where baby eels come from.