There is a certain purity in a subscription to the de facto Metroidvania genre; a series of connected levels unified by an intuitive map and open to progressive exploration as game mechanics develop and players increase in proficiency. Thankfully, obliging this contract leaves room for a signature at the bottom. Axiom Verge, for example,deviated with an antiquated style and a dependence on disruption, while Guacamelee got by with close-quarters combat and an insane commitment to luchadores.
Song of the Deep’s signature is more delicate. Instead of ostentatious overtures or a hard-nosed performance, Song of the Deep prefers a subdued appearance and quick call to adventure. It’s a simple story of Merryn, a girl whose father is lost under the sea, and her impassioned journey to save his life. Along the way she encounters dozens of nefarious sea creatures, vague conspiracies of ancient undersea technology, and, occasionally, some new friends. Song of the Deep is wise not to cash on Lovecraft’s recent resurgence, instead opting for a fresh and more family friendly narrative to support its gameplay.
Most interesting is Song of the Deep’s preferred means of movement. Merryn’s avatar begins not as a person, but as a submarine with immediate access to 360 degrees of motion. So many Metroidvania games rely on jumping as a central mechanic, and leaving that behind sets Song of the Deep up with a curious series of challenges to overcome. When everything is within reach, how do you wall off a myriad of treasures and upgrades?
Resistance is Song of the Deep’s answer to this question. Strong currents prevent Merryn from outright accessing certain caverns. Her engine can eventually absorb a few upgrades to increase the speed of its boost, but more often than not Song of the Deep provides looped hooks to grapple onto and reverse-repel along a surface. It’s a tricky and fun maneuver, and it’s an introduction that suggests Song of the Deep commitment to meaningful alterations.
While not as pronounced, Song of the Deep’s preference for combat also breaks away from genre norms. Merryn’s sub has a powerful claw that can act as a grappling hook, a throwing device, and straight-up steel punch. Early on this ensures she has to bring down her enemies face-to-face, creating a sense of risk with every encounter. Unfortunately, perhaps to appease a more diverse or younger audience, Song of the Deep opts to assign both movement and the claw’s direction to a single analog stick, rather than the popular method of dividing that responsibility between two of them. This is particularly upsetting during Song of the Deep’s somehow endless number of bomb-distributing sub-bosses; contending with environmental hazards and trying to volley bombs around is more cumbersome than convenient.
Combat in Song of the Deep, in general, tends to get stuck in the mud. Eventually Merryn’s sub is outfitted with a series of missiles reliant on an energy meter. Fire, ice, and lightning options aren’t as effective as simply charging up the claw, leaving each encounter as a basic game of cat and mouse. Worse, Song of the Deep is apt recycle more powerful versions of existing enemies, effectively muting weapon upgrades in the process.
Toward the end of the game, especially in the last area, Song of the Deep shrugs its shoulders and defaults to unloading hordes of enemies in small enclosures and tasking the player with obliterating them all before it allows progression. In small doses enemy encounters—pinwheel creatures that shoot projectiles, jellyfish that cause small explosions, armored sentinels that are nearly invincible—are fine, but it gets tedious when they’re thoughtlessly distributed. It doesn’t help that their AI is perhaps too streamlined for their own good, as it feels like someone is dragging them with a mouse cursor to get as close to the player as possible. All they know how to do is home in on Merryn. This is particularly vexing when a bloom of jellyfish rushes in to assault the player in the middle of an otherwise precise action.
Light puzzles compose most of Song of the Deep’s mid-section. Best among them is an entire area focused around manipulating mirror & laser puzzles (with one clever and unpredictable twist on your mechanics) and another involving a huge maze and seemingly impassable barriers of different colored light. Other than a few sequences where the player has to safeguard tethered, floating bombs (where Song of the Deep does its best impression of the original TMNT’s infamous bomb defusal/algae nightmare), puzzles serve as a light diversion from combat and basic navigation.
The remainder of Song of the Deep focuses on removing barriers to facilitate progression. You get a sonar device that activates certain beacons that manipulate doorways. Spotlights help explore the darkness, and your missile sets, as expected, solve an escalating series of blockades. There are a couple of boss fights worthy of note, but, as alluded to earlier, they include a frustrating series of repeating battles against a stone face that delights in tossing out timed bombs.
The allure (and the design efficiency) of a Metroidvania centers on revisiting past areas and using your new tricks to unlock greater secrets. In Song of the Deep, most of the time this awards either treasure to trade for upgrades at the shop or basic life and energy meter enhancements. Sometimes, however, you’ll find a quality of life item, such as an upgraded spotlight that shews away pestering algae or, a charge option for your claw. Upgrade items and treasure are marked on your map, but their nature isn’t explicit, providing enough ambiguity to lure the player in and seek them all out.
This is all assuming you want to get that deep in Song of the Deep’s shallow pool. Its series of connected levels, while beautiful, don’t have the organic flow expected of a wild world under the sea. And, other than the occasional puzzle-focused area, getting around its checkpoints can start to feel tedious. After about five hours Song of the Deep felt like busywork masquerading as challenge, as if there were a threshold of ideas and Song of the Deep was mandated to expand past its limitations. Obviously expecting an experience on the level of Super Metroid is unwarranted, Song of the Deep is $15 physical product so margins probably aren’t great for anyone involved, but it feels like tighter, more focused game could have resulted in a better adventure.
It doesn’t help that Song of the Deep is subject to a worrying number of quality assurance issues. There are a handful of bugs, like when a statues head I had to move became permanently lodged in the game world or when a fish refused to chase bait, but a few serious design flaws are more damaging. I had to restart my entire game because I elected to exit my sub in the middle of tense platform-crushing sequence that destroyed it. I had somehow made it to a checkpoint before it blew up, and when I respawned outside of my ship, the ship was instantly destroyed, leaving me stuck in a five second loop of inescapable hell. There’s an argument that I’m an idiot most people aren’t stupid enough to try that, but it was still infuriating.
It also wasn’t the only time it happened. Toward the end of the game, I had bombed a platform that held some clay pots. I died, and every time I respawned the platform was restored, but for some reason the clay pots still fell through the floor like it wasn’t there. The pots fell directly into a pinwheel and became lodged in that pinwheel, meaning I couldn’t rotate it with force from my ship and progress through the game. Song of the Deep only allows one save file, but at that point I was regularly backing my save up on a USB stick and only lost a half hour’s worth of progress. It’s important to note that these issues may be sorted out by the time Song of the Deep launches (copy that came with my review code stated there would be a day one patch to address progression issues), but it’s impossible to know as of the writing of this review.
Despite its modest trappings, Song of the Deep’s gorgeous presentation helps ease some of the aforementioned pains. Virtually every screenshot looks like a piece of hand-drawn art, a facet aided by endless parallax layers and Song of the Deep’s refusal to submit to mundanity. It’s busy without feeling overbearing and, other than the frame-rate occasionally taking a hit, beautiful all around. The lush music also hits well above Song of the Deep’s fighting weight, and the sparse voice acting compliments the themes of Irish culture tied to the narrative (and also features a voice actress with an authentic, non-Hollywood Irish accent).
Song of the Deep is a meandering lesson that not every reflection of Metroidvania has to be a grand odyssey. By that measure it’s a serviceable decent into the great unknown with a handful of neat ideas. It’s also too oblivious of its own limitations to leave a distinct impression in a crowded field. “Groundwork for something greater” isn’t a beacon of optimism, but it’s probably the finest impression Song of the Deep can manage.
