The Deluge

I have an odd relationship to floods, which is to say, I don’t actually have one. I’ve experienced earthquakes and hurricanes, seen a tornado, had to evacuate my home because of a wildfire, missed my wedding rehearsal due to mudslides, and hunkered down through more blizzards than I can remember before I decamped to Southern California (they’re way better than the fires). There are more exotic natural disasters beyond these, of course, but I’ve seen movies depicting avalanches and tsunamis and volcanos so there I at least have some second-hand associations of terror. But floods? I’ve never actually been in one, and they don’t present an especially cinematic prospect, unless a dam breaks or something. As a result, while I intellectually know they’re awful – witness all the recent deaths in Texas – I don’t have much of a visceral response to them. If anything I think the images of flooded towns can seem oddly peaceful, the ordinary landscape of roads and buildings transfigured.

So I vibed with The Deluge’s take on the theme: the nameless protagonist is forced by a flood to leave their home, but leaving everything and everyone behind doesn’t seem entirely unwelcome. This is a meditative game, the danger universally acknowledged but never actually approaching, allowing plenty of space to contemplate mistakes and paths not taken and consider what might come next. This choice-based game isn’t exactly parser-like – there are no compass directions, no inventory you can check, and no puzzles besides some order-of-operations stuff and one unique challenge I’ll circle back to later in this review – but you do have freedom to explore, ranging from your apartment to your old haunts to the outskirts to which you’ll eventually have to escape. There aren’t many direct conversations or anything you’d think of as an action sequence, but there is a lot of environmental storytelling, effectively narrated in a voice that focuses more on conveying sharp, concrete detail than providing a complete backstory for your character:

"The bed is unmade. You imagine yourself half-asleep, safe, warm, and as perfectly content as a stretching cat. You imagine the body beside you, reaching out instinctively for you without fully waking up."

This extends to the effects of the flood, too:

"You’re only halfway down the least-used of three stairwells when you realize the extent of the damage. Puddles slosh at your feet; a vaguely riparian odor drifts up from the basement below you."

There were times when this studied fuzziness of plot did present a slight obstacle; it seems like the protagonist has complex history with a lot of former lovers, friends, and family members, and since none of them are given names I sometimes had a hard time keeping them straight. But obfuscating the details helps reinforce the central vibe, of a mountain of regrets and guilty relief at being forced to leave them behind. It also means that when something does snap into focus, it gains additional power: there’s a charged conversation with an ex that really stands out, for example.

The gameplay, meanwhile, also meshes nicely with the theme. You can’t get everywhere from everywhere, and there are interactions that are only available on repeat visits or after you’ve gone someplace else first, which means that you spend a lot of time circling around the same ground, slowly building up to making your escape. There’s a list of things you need to accumulate before you’re able to finally go, some physical, some more nebulous, though I didn’t find a way to check these other than trying to leave, which made the transition to the endgame feel bit more abrupt than I would have liked (on the plus side, it was exactly as enigmatic as I liked). There’s also that odd gameplay mechanic I mentioned above – let’s spoiler this: (Spoiler - click to show)when I tried to find the key to my uncle’s boat, at first I thought I was stuck due to a bug that only let me toggle between two passages, rather than allowing me to retreat back to town when it didn’t turn up. I actually alt-tabbed for a minute to jot down some notes in frustration – but then when I alt-tabbed back, suddenly I’d found the key! I think this is a real-time mechanic that reveals the key after you’ve let the page stay up for a certain amount of time, which is formally interesting, but felt like an odd choice to me – the game doesn’t otherwise use timed text, I don’t think, and without that telegraphing I almost got annoyed and restarted the game! It’s something that I think is neat in isolation, but I’m not sure is a great fit for this game in particular.

That’s really the only discordant note I found in The Deluge, though – it’s otherwise a very coherent work, embedding some universally-relatable emotions in a distinct, and distinctly-presented package. It didn’t make me afraid of floods, but it did help me inhabit their aftermath with more clarity than I had before, making a case for rising waters as a pregnant metaphor worth dwelling on, regardless of their real-world dangers.