One of the things I liked most was that at the very start Kay said to herself: “I have family. “Solitude is for me the positive form of being alone.”īut at its heart Sea Of Solitude is exploring loneliness. The screen is deliberately and serenely free of any user interface or button prompts. Kay sat on the buoy and dangled her toes in the water. The water turned as blue as the sky and the buildings gave off the air of terracotta plant pots on a warm patio. When she’s in or near it she’s safe, and the sun shines.Īt one point in the demo Kay freed some trapped sunshine from a buoy, and that whole area of the map became safe to explore. When Kay is away from her little craft the sea churns and rain blackens everything. At the start, Kay is greeted by a little girl in a raincoat, who knows her name and gives her boat the power of sunny weather. In the game, Kay can see the city but can’t touch much of it, so the water is a barrier she can peer through but not breach. When you think of the sea, you might think of being marooned or adrift, or of the gulfs between people and places, the danger, the calm. At 82, every day he goes out.” Geppert also loves underwater monster movies, the archetype being Jaws, so from the beginning she knew that the sea was a strong metaphor for the story she wanted to tell. She knows how to swim, how to pilot a boat. Geppert describes Berlin as her chosen hometown, and loves it to the extent that the game's setting is modelled after a district of it, but she was born on the Baltic coast. The sea is obviously the biggest metaphor, literally and, er, metaphorically. Even a couple of weeks out from release I only got to see a tiny sliver from the opening: the protagonist, Kay, wakes up alone on a stormy sea, and makes her first foray into the half-drowned city she finds herself in. It’s a very story-focused and intensely metaphorical game, wherein, Geppert told me, "everything, everything you see and hear is a metaphor for something”. Sea Of Solitude has been mostly kept under wraps since that E3 reveal, because the team are wary of spoiling anything. Then she drew a definitive line under the tea discussion so we could talk about the game. She asked me if I’d like tea or coffee, and then what I knew about the game, and then if I always had milk in my tea because she couldn’t imagine doing that, and explained that she’d only really had tea when she was sick as a child and her mother gave her chamomile or mint tea. When I entered the room she suddenly appeared from behind a free-standing poster she’d been adjusting, exhibiting an astonishing amount of energy for someone describing themselves as very tired. It turns out that Geppert is sort of always like that. “I think it's normal when you do your project that you need to be passionate about it in order to make it good.” “The actual developers of course are always passionate about their project!” she said. Geppert is self-effacing about it, and told me it was surprising to her that people responded that way. You probably remember the reveal of Sea Of Solitude at E3 in 2018 because of CEO Cornelia Geppert’s excitement and sincerity when presenting the game.
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