In Other Waters

First Impressions

1,877 English reviews, 1,644 of them positive: 88%, labelled Very Positive (snapshot 2026-09-14). On the number alone this looks like a settled case.

Sort by helpful and it stops looking settled. The top negative has 232 votes, then 127, 115, 98. The top positive has 88. The most-read review of this game is a negative one. Broad approval and the most carefully written complaints, in the same pool.

And the complaints are not boredom. The 232-vote review opens by telling you to read the other reviews for what is good, because it wants to talk about something else. This is a game whose dissent is affectionate.

The World

The setting is Gliese 667Cc, an ocean planet. You do not play Ellery, the xenobiologist; you play the AI running her diving suit. What you see is not water but an instrument panel of contour lines and symbols. The ocean itself never appears.

The vocabulary on the positive side is remarkably stable. Beautiful. Great typography. The shifting colour schemes. The sound. One reviewer calls it art that could only exist as a game; another, a David Attenborough documentary compressed into a textbook.

The negative side praises the same screen. "The UI is lovely, which is why this hurts" is a recurring shape. The argument is not about quality but about what the screen withholds: creatures arrive as dots, and their bodies arrive only as prose.

Putting the Mechanics into Words

Count the verbs and you get about four: ping, scan, move, sample. Movement is not free either; you hop between nodes already placed on the map.

What is subtracted is sight, as in Return of the Obra Dinn — but in the opposite direction. Obra Dinn packs a still frame full and amplifies looking. This game leaves the image blank and asks you to fill it in. Environmental observation, with the object of observation replaced by prose.

The most repeatable complaint targets the cost of that trade. You cannot mark a point on a map of contour lines. You are not told which way anything lies. Samples read as white dots. A game leaning this hard on a cartographic look, one reviewer notes, gives you almost no cartographic tools.

Oxygen and power draw the same objection. They drain, but you cannot die, and saving and reloading refills them. A tension device left in place without consequences. More than one review simply asks why it is there.

The Feel of the Story

Ellery has come looking for Minae, a missing colleague, and finds an abandoned base and an unknown ecology. Jump Over The Age describe it on the store page as non-violent science fiction, and it is: there are no enemies.

What the positive side responds to hardest is the cataloguing. You study a lifeform, name it, fill the taxonomy. A reviewer identifying as a marine biologist wrote one of the warmer entries. Reading is the reward here.

The negative side carries a steady discomfort with Ellery talking about beauty. She keeps saying how beautiful it all is while you look at dots and lines. The seeing character exclaiming to the unseeing one grates once it repeats.

I read that less as failure than as the game's wager coming to the surface. If sight is left blank, only narration can fill it. Fill it richly and you crowd out imagination; fill it thinly and nothing lands. Where the line falls differs per player.

Teaching

The 232-vote negative review has a single subject: being pre-empted. You notice the reef looks wrong, and immediately Ellery says something may be infected. You find a swollen plant, and she says it looks infected.

The game hands you the conclusion before you reach it. Discovery needs a gap between noticing and confirming. With the gap at zero, only confirmation is left.

What makes it interesting is that this comes from kindness. A game that blanks out sight risks leaving the player lost, so the narrator takes their hand. It looks like over-compensating for the subtraction with explanation.

Compare Outer Wilds or Duskers. Both are unhelpful on purpose, and both keep hold of the feeling of a guess landing. That is the thing this game is most often mourned for.

Reviews Consulted

Written from the Steam store review pool as of 2026-09-14. No review text is quoted; typical claims are reconstructed.

・Steam: In Other Waters (1,644 of 1,877 English reviews positive = 88%, Very Positive)

・Read the top 15 helpful positive, top 10 helpful negative and 8 recent reviews via WebFetch. The playtime figure follows the 4-9 hours logged in reviews.

・The developer's own store description and the Metacritic 74 shown on the store page were consulted.

・Note: the Steam image CDN was unreachable from this run's environment, so no screenshot could be inspected. Rather than publish images we had not seen, this piece runs without figures.

Closing

Steam reads 88% positive and Metacritic 74. My number is 8.0, a little above the aggregate, for one reason: it commits to not showing you things, all the way through.

An ocean delivered without ever rendering an ocean. There are stretches where the wager pays off completely — a yellow dot sliding across contour lines while prose carries in the shape of a living thing. That time has no substitute.

The well-voted negatives are all correct, too. Too few map tools. Oxygen without consequence. A narrator who arrives at the answer first. Each looks like the people who made the blank becoming afraid of it.

Who it suits is unusually clear. If reading is playing for you, this may be irreplaceable. If you want a view behind the screen, it stays dots and lines to the end. If Eliza or Observation worked for you, start here.