this was really cool!! games where you walk from one place to another with cool visuals and effects are my jam haha.
(SPOILERS)
i LOVE how this game looks. the tileset and sprites are amazing and all tiny movements (the walking animations, the bubbles bursting...) feel super polished. and the colors! the overwhelming blue tint, the darkness in the screwed up sections, the neon lines and squiggles on the ground... and the cgs!! i absolutely love how expressive they are, even when it's only a closeup of two eyes; it's really impressive. and the filters!!! the wobbling of the screen, the black outline that only lets you see a circle... everything about the presentation is top notch, and on every sequence i really wanted to see what new visual tricks i'd get caught off guard by. the music is amazing too!! so calm and mysterious at the same time. i restarted the game to listen to the main theme and i kinda wanna put it in the background while i do stuff, which is one of the biggest compliments i can give to a song haha. and the sound when you get transported is so startling! i remember i was thinking "this is nice but i wonder if the entire game is just this?" and then the first teleport happened! such a cool way of subverting expectations :D the way this game looks and sounds is overall amazing!!
i really like how vague the storytelling is! everything being centered around loops and similar things happening in each level was really intriguing. following undine, seeing how her expression becomes more and more scared, hearing parts of stories and legends around her, watching different characters trapped that we can't reach (was that motherfucking HYDROS???)... it was all really engaging, i love stories that are open to interpretation and give small clues as to what is actually going on! things like the main character becoming faceless or, in the last level, there being more bubbles than usual (i don't even know why but that was really uncanny) work wonders to amp up the tension and mystery.
i feel like the level layout is a bit repetitive, and even with the amazing visuals sometimes i got a bit frustrated with how slow the character was moving and how nothing seemed to really happen for big chunks of my playthrough. maybe if you could run, or if the layout was more engaging, it wouldn't be as much of a problem? getting transported to the dark levels did make it more interesting though, so it's not that bad.
overall this was a great short horror experience! my theory with the story is that undine some kind of water creature that was made to lure people into the hands of its creator (maybe hydros?), for whatever reason (and this game is a nightmare she has about the victims she's managed to trap, which she didn't want to but was forced to). i know it's not the most complicated theory ever haha, but it's what i picked up :> great stuff!