![]() It’s based the real story of my personal experience, but I wanted to tell it in an abstract way, so that players can figure out - this girl, for example. There’s a lot going on with every character.Įverything in the world of Sea of Solitude has a meaning. Let’s have a look and see what we can do. If you look there, there’s one little girl waiting for us. There are just a few other beings in this world, other creatures or monsters, and you need to find them and figure out how they are connected to you. The world in Sea of Solitude is almost completely empty. The game is about finding out why this happened to her and how to turn her back into a human. Sea of Solitude is about this main character, a young woman named Kay, suffering from such loneliness that her inner feelings - darkness, anger, worthlessness, hopelessness - emerges outside her and she becomes a monster. The level designer also helped me with writing in between, and other things. It’s a real indie game in that respect, I would say. Miriam Jud is not only the lead animator on our game, but also the voice of Kay. It was really inspiring.īecause we’re so small, and the game is quite huge for so few people, the game revolves around different disciplines. Some people talked about their personal experiences, or those of family members or friends. In different levels we show different types. When I showed my co-workers the idea, the concept for the first time, the story, they were so inspired that they all came up to me, almost everyone, and started talking about their experiences around the main theme of the game, loneliness. But it’s not completely my thing, of course. I started writing down the first lines of the story, and the result is all this you see here, the game. I started writing it when I felt the loneliest, in both my private and working life. Sea of Solitude is the most personal game I’ve ever made so far. We’re about 12 people there, and then one guy in London who’s the composer. We’re a small indie studio based in Berlin. ![]() There are some enjoyable, even magical moments, in Sea of Solitude but they’re mixed in with some mediocrity that make it just a decent experience rather than sublime one.GamesBeat: Can you tell me about your company and the game?Ĭornelia Geppert: I’m the CEO, writer, and art director of a small game company called JO-MEI. It felt like it ran out of things to offer me long before it ended. While not a long game, by the end of Sea of Solitude I just wanted things to be done. The story was compelling enough that I wanted to see it through to the end, but the repetitive tasks within it lost their charm in the first half. It’s beautiful to look at, but it ends up being a lovely splash in a shallow pond. Sea of Solitude’s potential is never fully realized. Towards the end of the four- to six-hour story, there’s a slight variation on how you clear corruptions where you have to work with NPCs to reach some swarms that are otherwise inaccessible, but this quickly becomes a boring back-and-forth. That’s fun for a time, but unfortunately it never really changes in interesting ways as you play, eventually getting overly repetitive. The school chapter also establishes that gameplay loop of meeting a monster, getting to know their problems, and then getting rid of corruptions until they’re human again very early on. There’s no real point to it, no story reason for doing so, and it seems unnecessarily rude to the seagulls. You just have to find seagulls and shoo them away. The other collectible you can track down is, by comparison, a snooze. Plus exploring and enjoying the lovely environments was one of the best parts of Sea of Solitude. While these are optional to the main campaign, going out of my way to get them was a great way to add an extra challenge. They serve as both a fun thing to hunt for and an interesting and eerie reminder that others have been here before. Scattered throughout the world are different collectibles to find, the best of which are the messages in bottles. The voice acting didn’t help in this regard because the larger than life cadence of the monsters often made things feel like an overacted stage play rather than a series of real conversations. Intense screams and overuse of exclamations such as “leave me alone!” felt overly dramatic and consistently took me out of the story. If that was me, I would be asking for the bill early. ![]() It’s a shame that Sea of Solitude’s heavy-handed writing often gets in the way of the story it’s trying to tell, since it’s hard to buy into a relationship where someone says “you’re the kind of person I could imagine having kids with” on the first date. Things don’t always turn out how Kay wants, but eventually she accepts that the right decision isn’t necessarily the ideal one and that not all relationships can last. ![]() Most of all, I respect that Sea of Solitude isn’t all happy endings.
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