Why Beyond Blue is shaping up to be much more than Blue Planet: The Game
If you’ve ever been to a big, public gaming show, you’ll know a large part of your day is often spent being bombarded by at least fifteen different loudspeakers all vying for you to come and sample the source of their whizz-pop sound effects and booming trailer videos. E-Line Media’s booth for ocean explorathon Beyond Blue, however, was like a small oasis of calm when I visited it back at PAX East, if only because the developers had sensibly given everyone headphones so the soothing whines of its whales and sharp clicks of its playful dolphins wouldn’t get lost in the surrounding hubbub of the very loud Just Beats and Shapes pod next door.
I’m glad they did, because otherwise I’d have missed a large chunk of what makes Beyond Blue so intriguing. Developed in close partnership with the BBC’s Blue Planet II documentary crew, it might not offer quite as romantic a vision of the ocean as, say, the lovely Abzu does, but its natural, semi-photorealistic divers and sea life feel just as wonderful to control and interact with. Beyond that, its emphasis on tracking, cataloguing and getting players to think critically about the state of our own real-life oceans through what sounds like an almost Jurassic World Evolution-style strategy layer suggests E-Line are dropping their anchor much deeper than other ocean explorer games have before.