Endless Ocean Luminous is the third game in a series I have never played, but that hasn’t mattered a bit. It’s a diving game and I can barely swim, but that hasn’t mattered a bit. It’s a game in which nothing much happens, and what does happen only happens very slowly. Don’t mind. It’s a game with a thirty-player multiplayer component, which is theoretically the big draw, but feels like the wrong way to play.
All of this is to say: I’m not sure that Endless Ocean Luminous is particularly good – and I certainly wouldn’t want every game to be like this. But I’ve really enjoyed it so far.
This is a diving game. You’re deep beneath the oceans, wet-suited up, and you’re a scientist of some kind, which in this game means you point at fish. Fish come past? Point at them. Flock of fish in the distance? (Is flock the right term?) Point at them too. Point at big fish and small fish. Point at sharks and minnows. You get the idea.
By pointing at these fish, and holding down the L button as you do it, you’re scanning them. It’s quite cool. The individual fish are outlined in the UI and you get a bunch of light streaming off them which you can collect. This part – only this part – reminds me a bit of an action RPG where baddies scatter glowing plasma that you absorb, feeling all that XP goodness flow in as you do. In Endless Ocean Luminous, the more fish you point at allows you to open up new parts of the story, the chapters of which are all locked behind certain fish-pointing amounts. I thought the story was fine and kind of lovable in parts, but that wasn’t why I was pointing at the fish. Pointing at the fish is its own reward.
I’ll be honest: it’s become a bit of a groove I’ve settled into, or perhaps ‘strange middle-aged routine’ is more accurate than ‘groove’. Every night, I set aside thirty minutes for Endless Ocean Luminous, just to go in, splash around and point at fish, and I will probably continue to do this once I’ve finished writing about the game.
Why? Well, for one thing, it’s very peaceful. There’s very little drama in Endless Ocean Luminous, even when the plot gets cooking. This is why I don’t want to play with 29 other people online. It’s lovely to be underwater, to be alone in this world of shifting blue that changes every time you dive into it (although you can hang onto specific seeds for dives, if you want, which you probably won’t). There’s sand and rock below you, and there’s the shimmering of the surface above you. And who knows what you’ll find? Sometimes I explore thin channels of beige rock with tight corners. Sometimes it’s forests of kelp, or strange coraly formations that look like submerged beehives. This stuff is filled with fish to point at, so there’s exploration and just a little bit of busywork to keep you going. It’s mindless in a way that brings me a deep kind of calm. I probably shouldn’t be proud of this.
And then at times Endless Ocean Luminous suddenly pulls a mystery on you. Call it Endless Ocean Numinous: I’ll be down on the sea bed and I’ll see a gap, a hole beneath me. I’ll dive in and there will be darkness below me, a tunnel inviting me down. I’ll see fish and sharks below me which I know I haven’t yet pointed at. Some of the game’s collectables will probably be down there, and I’ll probably find an easy cloud of fish to point at to nudge me closer to unlocking the next story chapter. None of this is why I will explore, though, or why I’ll enjoy exploring. There’s a surprisingly effective combination of qualities in play here: underwater beauty, absolutely no danger, and the lightest of interactive elements. Again, apologies that this works so well for me in this particular instance.
While I’m admitting personal shortcomings, I should say: I’m the kind of person who loves fish tanks but never pays much attention to specific fish in them. I just love this little block of curated seabed in someone’s waiting room, and I love the general ribbony passage of life within it. The specifics don’t matter in some cases, just as I couldn’t really tell you much about the plot of Endless Ocean Luminous, or about how the ping system works in multiplayer, or about the details of the individual fish that you scan as you play. It’s just this block of a watery world and I get to head in and zone out. And I zone out because the stuff I’m meant to do here is so minimal. For this particular game, I can say: If there was more to it, I probably wouldn’t want to be here for its own sake in quite the same way. If Endless Ocean Luminous was slightly better at being a game, I would have moved on already.
A copy of Endless Ocean Luminous was supplied by Nintendo.
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