What Fisher Diver gets right

Fisher Diver is a neat little game about diving into the sea to kill monsters. Here’s the clever part:

All good games show your progress clearly. In some games you travel to the left, and that feels right. In some games you travel upwards, and that feels perfect. But in some games, you travel down.

It’s stuck in your brain, in the corner behind the sex drive: Up is good, Down is bad. When you ascend you’re getting closer to God, to Space, to enlightenment. In games like Winterbells – where falling is just a temporary setback – the pull of gravity feels like something pulling you home. No matter what giddy heights you reach, the place you started from is only ever a short drop away.

When you go down, you go to Satan, and you don’t come back. Gravity just pulls you closer and closer to the heart of the earth, making it harder and harder to get home. The monsters get bigger, the locations darker. Every step takes you farther away from your home and further down into a place that isn’t designed to support you. It’s a Heart of Darkness thing: Even if you find what you’re searching for, it seems less and less likely that you’ll ever get home.

You can see that in everything from Spelunky to Diablo to The Blinding of Isaac. Diablo gets extra credit because it’s leading you down to the actual devil, and Minecraft gets some itself because going into the center of the earth feels like a stupid decision you’ve made personally.

The trophy goes to Fisher Diver, though, because the Deep Sea is just about the perfect expression of that concept. Down in the depths your oxygen runs out, the sea is black, the monsters are abominations – the only thing missing is a pressure gauge with the glass slowly cracking. As your oxygen gets low you actually start blacking out,  the screen going dark for an instant before fading back in.

You’re going to die down here, and only the monsters will mourn you.