Even the Ocean's Sophomore Woes and Shadow Drafts
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Even the Ocean (Analgesic Productions, 2016) is built on the idea of complementary, opposing forces. Light and dark, horizontal and vertical, a push/pull between energies which should contradict but if balanced keep each other aligned. It’s an obvious framework for Analgesic to work from: a duo dev team (Melos Han-Tani and Marina Kittaka) working on their second title, known for blending surreal art and humor with classic game motifs, attempting to build on Anodyne’s (Analgesic Productions, 2009) unexpected success while creating something new. Emerging from these conflicts, Even the Ocean bares the scars of the prototypical sophomore effort: a sincere, divisive, and often bloated adventure whose unique charm has only grown despite falling short of the team’s best.
Though releasing three years prior to Anodyne 2: Return to Dust (Analgesic Productions, 2019), it is difficult now to discuss Even the Ocean without also bringing up what in many ways is its more refined evolution. Both games follow optimistic but naïve technicians – Anodyne 2’s Nova and Even the Ocean’s Aliph – as they work to repair their city’s infrastructure at the behest of its high council. Even the Ocean puts a greater emphasis on the technical details of this task, sending Aliph into powerplants to restart machinery and direct currents, but the result is the same. Power flows back to the city and its reach moves out.
What’s apparent when placing Anodyne 2 and Even the Ocean beside each other is how the former develops parallel themes of environmental preservation, the importance of small community, and the corrupting force of wealth accumulation, with a greater appreciation for subtly. Anodyne 2 is a small story with big consequences. It leans on allegory over firm answers and draws its emotional weight from its characters more so than allusions.
Even the Ocean, in contrast, opens with the narrator’s extended monologue as to the nature of energy and the history of the capital city, Whiteforge. We learn about the need for human’s to balance their energies, Aliph’s history with the rural environment, and her skill as a climber all before the game properly starts. It feels like a response to criticisms towards Anodyne’s ambiguity, an opening to signal Even the Ocean as a more elaborate, straightforward narrative. But the swing is so hard it plunges into dry history lessons before we’ve been given a reason to care. This opening is representative of an overarching seriousness and anxiety throughout the game, one perhaps deserved given the gravity of its conclusion but which feels at odds with the whimsical incidental dialogue and playful level design.
Even the Ocean is not humorless, but it often feels as if its humor belongs in another game. The seams where what were once two games (Even and The Ocean) become one are impressively hard to spot, but broadly there is a sense that ideas are being compressed to make room for extra areas, while at the same time lingering on plot points less interesting than the character drama underneath them.
When the camera pulls away from the end-of-days threat, Even the Ocean is capable of capturing moments of simple humanity with gorgeous eloquence. Visiting Aliph’s parents on the way to a powerplant sees her torn between her sense of responsibility and a desire for human connection. Every scene with Yara – partner to an older technician killed on Aliph’s first mission – is a brutal reflection of Aliph’s guilt and difficulty relating to others. These moments are tender and given space to open up. Anodyne 2 uses small narratives like these to weave its overarching plot, but in Even the Ocean they are pushed to the sidelines to be sought out by more curious players.
Once out of the city Even the Ocean falls more comfortably into line with Analgesic’s other projects as a sharply designed response to 90s platformers and JRPGs. Flipping between an isometric overworld and side-scrolling levels, Even the Ocean captures a natural beauty and grandeur greater than its modest map size. It does not take long to walk from one side of the continent to the other, but each area has such distinct personality they conjure images of a broader distance. Forest libraries sit beside dream inducing caves, telepathic beaches wash against towering canyon cliffs, and a town rests beneath the snow where trees grow sideways.
Whatever Even the Ocean lacks in thematic impact it makes up for in technical skill. Lush painted backdrops flow in parallax over pixel sprites, bold colors and soft lighting drawing out small details in surreal landscapes. Even the harsh industrialism of the powerplants have an illustriousness to them, merging elements of the surrounding environment with cold machinery and encroaching plant life; nature's resilience pushing against Whiteforge's desire for control. Despite their climatic diversity each area is fully at home within this incongruous world, with loosely justifying liminal spaces being all that is needed to bridge the gaps.
Analgesic wisely allow the player to linger in these levels. The pace is ponderous, complimented by Aliph’s organic movement. She only has a few moves but they‘re all she needs to gracefully vault up walls, over plants, and against the elements. Nothing else controls like Even the Ocean. It is, impossibly, always as loose or precise as necessary, taking the best elements of momentum heavy platformers (Rayman Origins, Sonic) and precision ones (Mario, MegaMan, Super Meat Boy) and marrying them so cleanly it’s as if Analgesic have been creating platformers for decades.
Regrettably, like most of its peers Even the Ocean chooses to conclude with a gauntlet run of obstacle course challenges, blunting the otherwise magical sense of discovery which comes at each new level. Like the double-album is imitates, Even the Ocean is overflowing with ideas rich enough to support their own games. The best eventually make it into Anodyne 2 and retroactively cause Even the Ocean’s growing pains to resonate that much louder, but though less developed those moments of excellence are just as inspired here.
Even the Ocean sits unfortunately between an early indie hit and a decade defining classic. It is the studio’s most technically accomplished game to date but lacks the emotional heft of its siblings; a delight in itself that falls shy of the incredibly high bar Analgesic have set for themselves. But as a transitional piece it is one of the best modern examples we have of thematic development across games, made more interesting through Anodyne 2's parallels. More immediately, Even the Ocean's post-game content elaborates on Analgesic's creative process, building context through a collage of playable drafts, half-formed ideas, and broken mechanics.
This “shadow world” of sorts is like looking at Analgesic’s sketchpad, the messy work-in-progress design documents so rarely published (data leaks notwithstanding). Many of these drafts are broken, filled with placeholder assets, and liable to crash the game, yet I’m fascinated by their unvarnished experimentation. There is so much dissonance between assets – pixel art and bright green squares and developer commentary sitting incongruously side-by-side in levels that don't make sense. These scenes carry a strikingly informal tone, far from the high-production of documentaries or tightly wrapped post-mortems, driven by a desire to share the experience of a long dev process and the thousands of mundane decisions involved in shipping a game (Anodyne 2 has a similar draft area that is comparatively restrained though I’d argue more successful).
Games involve so many people and skillsets, take inordinate amounts of time and money to produce, yet so often that process is purposefully hidden, perpetuating the implicit belief that games emerge fully formed. Throughout their career, Analgesic have pushed against this practice, highlighting the labor of creating games and engaging the player not as a customer but part of the process by which games take on meaning. It is rare in games to see themes and processes evolve so transparently across a developer’s body of work, and to be able to trace that development through Even the Ocean for two of the most talented creator’s working in the medium today is a gift.