Your nuclear sub will catch fire at some point, spring leaks, suddenly become radioactive. But where the Silent Hunter series are all studio projects, Sub Commander is the creation of one indie designer and closer to FTL. If Silent Hunter III is for pretending you're in Das Boot, Sub Commander is The Hunt For Red October.

Grab some graphics mods to spruce up the 2005-era looks and dive into the simmiest sub sim that's ever simmed. If you yearn to fiddle with dials that let you adjust speeds down to the individual knot, then Silent Hunter 3 is for you. This is the game where people go for the full U-boat fantasy, playing without time compression so missions take literal days and they have to alter their sleeping patterns around it. Silent Hunter 3Īs far as submarine simulators go, Silent Hunter 3, especially with mods, is as in-depth as they get. Insaniquarium takes the inane pleasantness of owning a fish tank and video gamifies the hell out of it. Then you get a snail who helps you collect the coins your fish drop, and a swordfish who helps you fight off alien invaders who teleport inside your tank and will eat your fish unless you laser that alien to death. At the basic level Insaniquarium is just about owning fish: decorative wet idiots who can't be trusted not to starve. Insaniquariumĭrop a pellet and one of your guppies either eats it and grows, or doesn't and turns belly-up. Then Flow stops being a peaceful interactive screensaver, abruptly becoming a game about the circle of life. Creatures one level over are always visible and as you shift, the outline of a ray three times your size might suddenly stop being a blur and become an orange threat ready to eat you. You're a microscopic wormy creature gobbling up plankton-like blobs: eat a blue one and travel to an ocean plane one shade lighter, eat a red one and travel to a deeper blue. The bit in Spore where you're a single-celled creature working up the food chain was essentially an interactive screensaver, but still one of its best parts. The best underwater games draw inspiration from the life cycles of marine creatures, from what it's like to move through water, from all the dangers and wonders of the ocean. They're not first-person shooters set at the bottom of the sea or games about fish who are also secret agents. If we're going to get wet, it's better when games dedicate themselves entirely to representing the experience of being underwater. Swimming controls usually fill us with dread because they don't get the same care or finesse as everything that surrounds them. Underwater levels in platformers, token diving sections in open-world games-they're usually not great.

Insaniquarium generator