I’ve been playing A Tale of Silent Depths for a while and I gotta say, I ended up way more hooked than I expected. The immersion in this game is really, really good. There’s something about exploring this huge underwater world that just pulls you in. I legit kept saying "okay, one more area" and then suddnenly an hour had passed lol. The map feels surprisingly big and rewarding to explore, and finding weird places, routes and little discovereis gave me that old-school sense of adventure that a lot of games kinda miss these days. The game is built around exploration in a large procedural ocean setting.

The pixelart is also pretty awsome and fits the atmophere perfectly. It has this moody underwater vibe where the visuals and the setting work really well together. Nothing feels out of place and the whole thing has a cool identity. Some moments felt weirdly relaxing and creepy at the same time, which is kinda hard to pull off. I had a lot of fun with it and honestly I think this game deservs more attention. Definitely recomend it if you enjoy exploration and getting immersed in a world.

Buggy (annoying not game breaking), poor performance (startup), missing quality of life, empty game world. I also expect to lose at some point in a roguelike.

Bugs:
- Settings not persisted. Set master volume to 1% (volume is quiet). Exit game, open game (volume is loud). Low volume is applied on entering settings menu.
- Quests not persisted. Start a new game, ask smiley hat man where to find pirates (get entry "after the merritts"). Exit to menu, continue game. Journal is now empty.
- Item duplication. In the inventory screen left click and drag an item to the hot bar (but do not release left mouse). Right click while holding left mouse (item is added to hotbar, but not removed from inventory)
- Can't learn new recepies? Left/Right clicking in inventory does nothing, puting on my hotbar does not give a use option. This is how I found the item duplication, moving that stupid recepie around trying to find a place to use/learn it.

Performance:
- Loading AND closing the game takes a literal minute+ (on my computer). Due to the local LLM? I get that driving some logic with an LLM is nifty, but my first experience with this game was wondering if it had crashed on loading screen. Devs know this is an issue, because the title screen includes instructions to adjust the LLM settings if you can't start the game.

QOL:
- Travel is tedious. No fast travel between explored tiles? Right clicking sets a tile to move to, and clicking a new location clears current movement. So if I'm traveling between locations manually (because there is no fast travel), I either wait for the sub to stop before selecting a new spot to move, or double clicking (to clear current path then set a new one).
- Merchants have limited inventory space and money. Not sure why I have to buy a stack of a 10c junk from the merchant before they will buy my $1,000 blueprints.
- Mining. The world is littered with clusters of rocks, that have resources in them. To mine requires clicking each one individually, some of which are hidden by terrain (requiring camera rotation to click). Maybe this is intentionally bad, and an upgrad lets me mine nearby later, but 2 hours in I was still clicking each rock separately. Maybe I'm supposed to realize mining is terrible and move on to hunting for enemies (but crafting menu suggests I actually want a stockpile of raw materials for cool stuff)
- Scanner does little. It shows where resource nodes on screen are, and offscreen enemies. It also costs energy, which is a combat resource. I stopped using it, because it did not provide useful information.

Empty:
- Most zones were rocks trees and hills. Occasional wildlife to kill for exp, or pirates to kill for exp (and a loot box). I once found a big sea creature, which died easily and dropped money. Why am I exploring or getting stronger, if there is nothing to find, or threats to defeat?

Death in traditional roguelikes:
- I expected threats. A big monster to avoid. A deep chasm to to build up to explore. Pirates to run away from? But all enemies crumpled to the stuff I found early. Maybe I found OP stuff early (a weapon that fired for 1ap instead of the 2ap the other stuff required). But I expected danger, risk/reward, and mystery. I got bored wandering around mining rocks and fighting paper pirates.

This game is genuinely interesting and has a lot of potential but for now it feels a bit like early access. I explored around for about an hour and couldn’t find anything to do other than fight tiny but mighty sea creatures and combat is difficult. I met some people in the very beginning but I couldn’t tell what they were and I didn’t get a quest from them after chatting so it was a bit confusing.

The town didn’t really look like a town or anything but a gathering of rocks with a statue.

Tentative thumbs up for the amount of potential this has and its design and theoretically will be super fun if more gets added to the map. For now it feels empty. Sunless Sea is one of my favorite games ever and I was hoping this would be similar.

Steam deck players - it’s possible but not great. The text boxes are cut off and you have to update the AI settings to get it to run. I’m wondering now if that has anything to do with how empty it felt.