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Games

'Narcosis' Uses Isolation to Make You Fear the Ocean

Trapped at the bottom of the sea, your only option is to walk forward. And pray.

I don't have any phobias (I think), but a few things get my heart racing a mile per minute: spiders, sitting at the edge of a tall building, and being locked in a confined space for long periods of time. Narcosis preys upon the last one. Set in a deep underwater facility dealing with the aftermath of an earthquake, players traverse the busted equipment and endless darkness of the ocean floor for a way to the surface. Though rough around the edges, Narcosis is brutal and haunting.

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"Does it make it better knowing how bad things really are?" mumbles the game's narrator, speaking with a mysterious distance about the events depicted. "The suit keeps out what you need to be afraid of, but the fear is trapped in there with you and it's…thriving. So, yeah, maybe you're safe and dry, but inside, you're drowning. I made mistakes down there, yes. Did I lose my mind? No. No way."

Narcosis is not Dead Space. Though a mechanical engineer, you aren't suddenly a hero. The ocean remains steadfastly in control, and the best you can do is slowly but surely shuffle your way forward and hope for the best. There's an oppressive quality to the world around you, an inability to ever be fully aware of where you are or what you should even be afraid of. Narcosis plays with the idea of your character slowly losing their oxygen-deprived mind, but it's never clear if the hallucinations in front of you are supernatural or consequences of fear.

It's tough to diagnose personalized fear. There's no traumatic event that explains why seeing a tarantula, its eight legs surrounding its billion beady eyes, makes my skin crawl. I don't know why the mere act of imagining being locked in a coffin causes sweat to develop on my neck. And I can't fully tell you why I always seek out a way to confront these nightmares through horror media. A way to explore fear in a safe setting? Maybe. An addiction to the way it makes me feel alive?

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Much of Narcosis is spent in isolation, as you sift through the rubble, and, far too often, discover what's left of your colleagues. One might be found trying to hide in a vent, presumably as the waves came crashing in. Another tried putting on a diving suit, only to drown, as the helmet slipped out of their hands. Narcosis is at its best when it leaves you alone, and lets the world do the talking. The destruction laid bare, the thought of being stranded in the water alone, until your suit's systems fail, is enough. Your imagination does the rest of the terrible work.

Images courtesy of Honor Code

(One of the worst moments of the game, though, was when I discovered what can only be described as motherfucking sea spiders. I expected the game to exploit one of my fears, but two? Cruel. One sequence had me begging for release.)

Too often, though, it intrudes, relying on tropes to amplify the tension. One of the game's most effective jump scares, in which a sea creature latches onto your helmet, blocking you from seeing anything but its desperate attempt to plunge itself into your eyes and mouth, had me screaming into a VR headset. It was less effective when the game deployed this scare for the 10th time. Worse, the only way to avoid being put into the situation again is to randomly swipe at the creature with your knife, an unwieldy affair that's best at producing frustration.

Like the game's too-frequent platforming sequences and reliance on enemy AI that can't decide which direction it wants to go, Narcosis has ambitions it can't always deliver on, frequently undercutting what the game does do well.

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Those hurdles are worth overcoming, though, for an eerie trip under the sea. At its best, Narcosis was so uncomfortable I couldn't play it for more than 30 minutes at a time. I was playing Narcosis in the morning, prior to the start of work, but because I was locked into a VR headset, it mattered little that the sun was rising into the sky behind me.

You don't need to wear a VR headset to play Narcosis, but it's highly recommended. (Make sure to turn off the default movement setting, which ties turning to your head. It's better to rely on a gamepad.) The feeling of being stuck inside a stuffy suit is amplified by being stuck inside a stuffy headset.

It only takes a few hours to finish Narcosis, but honestly, that's a blessing. The game doesn't stay around too long, and by the end, I wanted out of the water just as much as my dude in the suit.

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