When Storytelling Goes Adrift: A Review of ‘Sea of Solitude’
Riding the wave of 2019 releases, I had high hopes that Sea of Solitude would be an emotionally driven experience that told its story through artistic direction and style. It was reported that Sea of Solitude would be spoken about in the same conversations as Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice in terms of how it refreshingly dealt with mental and emotional struggles. Sea of Solitude came unnervingly close being an instant classic, something timeless akin to Journey or Gris, but failed to achieve that status due to clumsy writing that subtracted from the experience.
Sea of Solitude is a beautiful game. Your character, Kay, wakes up alone as turbulent waves rock her boat back and forth. In this dark storm, you see a glowing light in the distance. Rather than worry about herself, Kay’s first instinct is to assume that glowing light might be someone in need and that she should help them. This sets the tone for the rest of the game’s visual and narrative themes. Kay is trapped in her own darkness but chooses to use her own energy to bring others out of that darkness.
Kay finds herself in a seemingly abandoned world that echoes Venetian architecture, complete with cramped, winding streets that she must navigate through. The game bounces between two color palettes. When things are going well and Kay is clearing corruption from the city, the lighting is vibrant and the buildings exude brilliant pastels. Little hotel signs and street lamps pepper the city that, despite being totally uninhabited, feels like a living thing as much as it does a place. When Kay discovers a new area, she encounters violent thunderstorms that cover the sunlight and turn the city into a threatening noir aesthetic, complete with an aquatic monster that has a particular pension for following Kay hungrily around.
I found it impossible to keep my thumb off the screenshot button while playing through for the first time. Everywhere you turn can be framed into a brilliant image. The graphics aren’t impressive so much as they are well designed, and a game doesn’t have to be realistic to be immersive. In particular moments, Sea of Solitude is more immersive than any game I have played in 2019. For visual style alone, this game is worth looking into.
The level design was one of the unexpected treats to my experience with this game. Anyone who follows my work will know that I prefer an experience to a challenge, and this is no exception with Sea of Solitude. The game doesn’t offer much in the way of difficulty, and I found myself breezing through sections. Most of your time will be spent navigating Kay’s boat around or running around, climbing ladders and evading monsters via mild platforming. Players who are looking for a learning curve to the game will not find one, but I found that to be a sound mechanical decision by the developers. This game wants you to reach the end.
Completionists and players looking for a little more to contend with will find some pleasure in the game’s two main collectibles: seagull shooing and messages in bottles. The messages in bottles can be found peppered around almost anywhere in a level, often tucked underneath a platform or behind a hidden ladder, etc. Each of these messages forms a kind of communicative thread that suggests that Kay isn’t the first one to visit this sea of solitude. The seagulls are also something that I found immensely gratifying to collect. Kay spots an odd seagull hanging out on a ledge and tells it to “shoo!” In these serene moments, the camera follows the seagull off into the distance for about 5-10 seconds. It’s as though they serve as a metaphor for Kate’s inability to just fly away from her monsters. The freedom that the seagulls symbolize was genuinely peaceful after stressful sections.
The name “Sea of Solitude” is an odd decision given how the plot unfolds. Kay confronts monsters throughout the game that take the guise of self-sabotaging inner voices, personifying people’s worst self-destructive tendencies. This premise is fascinating and would be worth dedicating an entire story to, but the game almost immediately steers away from this self-exploration into a more interpersonal journey. I found this to be a letdown because Kay’s inner monsters are so compelling. Instead, as aforementioned, Kay’s story turns out to be about how – even though she in a corrupted, monstrous state – she helps others before helping herself.
As the story steers away from exploring Kay’s own psyche, it quickly becomes a story about how each member of her family – her younger brother, her mother and father, and her boyfriend Jack – have broken stories that have driven them into these monstrous forms. Kay’s brother, Sunny, takes the guise of a massive black raven, who was bullied into suicidal thoughts by his peers while no one listened at home. Kay’s parents turn into bizarre octopus and chameleon forms, both having rushed into childbearing before they were ready, which caused them to resent each other. Jack started withdrawing from social circles, feeling anxious and ostracized by people he once cared about. Each monster has a redemptive trauma that causes Kay to care, despite the risk and obstacles to her doing so.
When lumped together into one overarching narrative in Sea of Solitude, Kay’s family troubles are all too easily boiled down to “listening.” Frequently throughout, the solution to each one of their problems was listening to each other. Kay never listened to her brother when he was being bullied, and so she promises to listen more as a way of bringing him down from his monster form. Kay tries to get her parents to listen to each other when they end up fighting, and it takes a tragically unconscious Kay to make them realize they could do better. And so on.
Though I appreciate the affirming and optimistic message that Kay’s character presents, I am insulted by the simplicity of the message. The game seems to say that you can overcome the tragedies and broken parts of your life simply through willpower. But especially in a game that dips its toes into the conversation about mental illness, the complete lack of nuance stunned me. I can’t think of a single line of dialogue throughout the game that is memorable – with the exception of some cringeworthy, teeth-gritting ones.
The game focuses on heavy topics that require deadly seriousness because of how they impact both the character and the player. I don’t mean to dismiss the creator’s work with Sea of Solitude, because it is obviously a personal passion project that stems from her own life experiences. But this was an instance of “show don’t tell,” the advice that so many young writers need with their fiction. There is very little trust given to the player to interpret the story without Kay spelling every emotion out like an alphabet soup of emojis. But Sea of Solitude is insecure with its visual storytelling – the silence and interpretation such stories require – choosing to offer a mouthful when a teaspoon would do.
I can’t end this review on such a critical note because I really liked this game. For all its faults, Sea of Solitude is a phenomenal journey through the mind, pulling me down into the depths of self-hatred and repression, as well as guiding me through the journey back out of them. So I’d like to briefly go through the story of Sunny, which is undoubtedly the most compelling 30 minute sequence in any game I’ve played this year.
If you are at all interested in Sea of Solitude, this is why you should be: In Sunny’s chapter, the exposition pumps the breaks and instead, we are treated to almost purely atmospheric narrative. The sequence starts by Kay investigating the giant raven who has fled in isolation to the top of a building. She enters the dark building and is encountered by maleficent memories of Sunny getting bullied in school, with a dread-inspiring pulse of the words, “We’re going to find you. We’re going to kill you,” repeating in your ears. Kay can viscerally feel the agonizing anxiety that her brother Sunny did. Kay is trapped in a claustrophobic space with harmful, evil children spirits that reek of the same corruption that she has been dispelling throughout the game. By the time she escapes this space, it’s a genuine moment of relief. I felt like I was trapped in hell with her.
Sunny’s story was perfect storytelling. There was a clear objective for Kay to achieve. The backstory was simple enough to be clear, but also open enough to be interpreted. The atmosphere – sound, layout, lighting, gameplay – reinforced the narrative being told. And as a player, the only word I could keep thinking of when trying to describe this scene is “dread.” Sunny’s chapter was so immersive that I felt pure, bottomless despair. To me, moments like that are what makes video games powerful.
I think the reason the writing felt so weak overall is because there were too many stories crammed into the experience. Clocking in at just under 3 hours playtime, we’re expected to care about Sunny, her parents (individually), Jack, and eventually Kay herself. It feels like a wasted opportunity to spend so little of this game exploring Kay’s own mental monsters. There are so many obvious implications to what encountering various mental monsters could bring to bear on the conversation about video games as a storytelling medium. And I wouldn’t be surprised if Sea of Solitude inspires another generation of indie developers to make something personal of their own.
I think this game tried to do something important by representing its characters and story in the manner it chose to – which, as far as I’m concerned, is wholly innovative in the gaming space. I hope that for some people this game will be that instant-classic experience that I was looking for. By the end, the narrative just ended up feeling cliched and unreflective. But Sea of Solitude will stick with me for a long time.
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