Thalassophobia
A downloadable game
Explore the deep ocean floor in a claustrophobically small research vessel with a limited radius of light. Observe and record bizarre fish. You'll be fine.
Thalassophobia is a short one-page game for creative solo or co-op horror storytelling and art prompt generator. Draw some weird fish, alone or with a friend, and maybe don't die in the crushing depths.
Couple weeks back I was watching Underwater (2020), a film where Kristen Stewart spends a lot time in her underwear, but not in a gross sexist way, in a "too much of a dirtbag to put on pants in a crisis" way, which I both respect and endorse.
It's kind of like Alien (1979) but underwater in a pointedly titular sense, which is funny because the elevator pitch for Alien is said to have been "Jaws in space" which would make it "Jaws in space underwater" which sounds like maybe just Jaws (1975) but it very much is not Jaws.
Anyway the environmental horror of Underwater was so good, and it made me think I would like to make a game about thalassophobia and call it Thalassophobia because that's a very good word, so I wrote that down. Then I was browsing jams and saw a jam called thalassophobia and that seemed serendipitous so I bumped the idea to the top of the queue.
And here it is, a game about dying horribly at the bottom of the ocean, with or without pants. Enjoy.
Download
Click download now to get access to the following files:
Comments
Log in with itch.io to leave a comment.
Thalassophobia is a short, simple little game about exploring the depths of the ocean using a hex grid to mark out what you find!
Through the game you fill 4 tracks, Pressure, Dread, Oxygen, and Data. If you hit 10 on data, you win! If you hit 10 on any of the others, something terrible has happened and it's the end of the line for you.
In order to fill these tracks you roll 1d6, and you might see a wonder, a fish, nothing at all, or your oxygen might be in trouble. For wonders, you get an additional chart to roll to see what you see, and for fish, you roll for each of the body parts and record what kind of creature you encounter.
For every day you also plot along where on the hex chart you end up, and should you acquire all the data you need, you need to make it back to your starting point.
This game is very simple, there’s only one chart for the fish, which can make them feel a little bit repetitive if you keep rolling the same trait for one of the body parts. (I kept getting gel mouth over and over.)
I also spent a lot of days exploring empty ocean floors, which was a little bit frustrating because I didn’t roll a lot of wonders, which is something I would have wanted to explore more of given how big the table was in comparison to everything else.
I would LOVE to see an expanded version with more tables for the fish, and maybe a higher chance of rolling a wonder instead of the empty floor.
Overall Lovely game and you can find my playthrough here