I love learning. And edutainment is a great way to accomplish said goal. A good educational film or game is a fantastic way to learn about our world (and for me, is quite literally the only reason I’d bother watching TV in any capacity these days). There are lots of edutainment video games out there, some I’m quite fond of, but they are a rare sight—which is why developer Chaos Theory Games and publisher E-Line Media’s newest adventure title ‘Beyond Blue: After the Storm’ caught my eye. I am a biologist by trade and not appending marine science to that degree was a mistake of mine that I hope to correct someday. And with After the Storm, maybe I could actually get some underwater experience that won’t have me flailing about in fear.
You know, because I can’t swim. Another regret!
And in quite a few ways, Beyond Blue’s latest VR sequel does a decent job of offering an introduction to the vast ocean and the work that goes into learning about its function, the life within it, and what we as a species have done that actively harms it for our own greedy ways. And yet, it’s also lacking both as a VR experience and in the information it provides, much to my disappointment.
Get those sea legs ready, we’re going for a dive!
One Fish, Two Fish
Beyond Blue: After the Storm has players take on the role of Mirai, a young lady who agrees to help a colleague by the name of Andre with an investigation he’s been working on. There have been seismic activity occurring off the coasts of Sydney and the marine life in the vicinity have been falling ill. The player is tasked with assisting injured fishies and repairing and/or destroying structures that impede progression in this linear adventure. To do all this, Mirai has a number of tools at her disposal—she can use a special foam gun that heals coral reef and the more active living things deep below, she has a welding and saw tool, a scanner that can be used to collect data on marine life encountered, and more importantly: a sidekick by the name of Kanaloua.
All these tools can be found on Mirai’s hip, which can be pulled out with the grasp of the Quest’s side triggers. There’s no real selection menu, but the game will pull out the right tool for the job when needed. The scanner particularly comes in handy as you can use that to get some small factoids on scanned marine life, which would quite nice if the game gave me a few more seconds to read them as they have a tendency to disappear with the quickness compared to other menus. I’ve only recently started getting back into VR gaming and as I’m getting my sea legs in order (harr harr), I’m finding that it can be a difficult to read text in-game, particularly subtitles, so I hope an option to keep text on-screen for longer is in consideration down the line. Subtitles often had misspellings or outright different word choice at times too, which I found rather odd.
But the good news is that controlling Mirai is absolutely not a problem. Her character controller has weight to her and there are multiple movement types available to players: the left and right thumbsticks can move across the XYZ axes, but the more immersive method would be to use her diving suit’s built-in thrusters to move you to and fro. Both thrusters can be used to speed up movement, though sadly physical movement does not impact controls in any way. But it did make me look silly to my mother, who enjoyed watching me scan away at life below the sea.
Beyond Blue does a great job of immersing the player under the sea. Even if the playing field is rather small, I found myself jiving with the ocean, ducking and swerving around rocks and rubbish that had found its way into the sea. All your objectives are marked on your left-hand watch and on an objective menu I accidentally pulled up once (no idea how, by the way!) so getting things done won’t be an issue. Kanaloua will also help the player with larger problems that she can’t handle on her own, requiring you to swap characters to progress at time.
I don’t mind this, but I wish Kana would follow the player or at least stick close. Nearly all game objectives require Kana to be close to the player in some way, but he will never move on his own unless you transition to the next part of the stage. A lot of your time in After the Storm will be spent getting Kana and Mirai into place, making this journey seem more one-sided than everyone’s banter makes everything out to be.
And while I enjoyed the adventure, After the Storm has very little in the way of interactables. Sure, you can scan wildlife to learn more about them, but they’re little more than surface-level facts that you’ll likely forget once the window disappears. You can’t reach out for fish, nor interact with some of the larger creatures like the Orcas. Heck, you can’t even hang onto one! My underwater researcher dreams are now gone with the fishes. But hey, at least I can fist-bump Kana. Andre, Kana, and Mirai do a lovely job of bouncing off one another with friendly dialogue and keeping what would otherwise be a very quiet undersea trip.
After the Storm’s narrative is focused specifically on the human impact on the ocean and everything beneath. The game’s beautiful, bright and colourful visuals will be marred by red and pink, an indicator of leaking methane and other harmful indicators of climate change and active destruction of the ocean floor through illegal deep-sea mining. Admittedly, the latter had never occurred to me as something that would actively be occurring, but that’s the best part of edutainment—finding out something new and hitting the books to learn more. This does mean that the game does do a bit of a turn-heel with its narrative, where Mirai will go from exploring lovely coral reefs to suddenly investigating a deep-sea illegal operation.
From here the player is tasked with a stealth reconnaissance mission involving knocking out Kana-like prototypes, whisking them away with inflatable balloons, and destroying a bunch of rigs that are significantly destroying the mineral-rich environment that is the seafloor bed. Mind you, it’s a neat shake up to gameplay, all though I ultimately found myself disappointed that we never get to go back to exploring the ocean again after the conclusion of this act. After the Storm is a roughly 2-hour adventure, give or take (I had to take a few breaks, VR really eats at me!), and though I enjoyed the pacing of the story, I felt that much of its teachings are very surface-level. I would have enjoyed reading more facts on the sea life we encounter in the game, more on humanity’s impact on the environment, and the like.
Now, some of this is eloquently handled via in-game interactions and conversations between characters. I’m a big fan of “show, not tell” and After the Storm generally does a good job of that. There are also little “Ocean Insights” videos after the end of the game that go over some of the narrative themes in full documentary-style videos featuring marine biologist and educator Dr. Erika Woolsey. They’re neat little shorts, but they don’t take advantage of VR in any shape, being played in a menu window on the main menu screen with no way to full screen them. And to top it off, the game’s music and sound effects continue to play over the videos, forcing me to mute all that myself because the game clearly thought I wasn’t interested in some good old educational content.
Beyond Blue: After the Storm is an enjoyable little underwater adventure that gives insight on man-made disasters along with the lovely living things beneath our feet. Though their importance is stressed, information comes off slim at best and paired with a decent VR experience at the very least makes this game a fun edutainment journey for all ages. ∎
Beyond Blue: After the Storm
Played on
Meta Quest 3
PROS
- Lovely visuals.
- Fun banter between cast members.
- Entertaining short videos on coral reef, ocean health, and our impact on the environment.
- Solid character controller.
CONS
- A lack of interactivity with the environment.
- A sudden turn-heel in scenario and a rather abrupt end is disappointing.
- Information is a bit too surface level for my liking.
- UX issues.
