You are Harold, last name Halibut, on board the spaceship Fedora and assistant to the ship's lead scientist. Its been 250 years since all on board fled Earth and found themselves unexpectedly marooned at the bottom of an alien ocean. Where Harold goes about his days tending to the fish, and the All Water Company is all powerful, and some on board still work towards leaving the watery depths.
I am about 90 minutes in and am having a ball.
I confess (yet again) to being an aficionado of the painstaking meticulousness that is involved in creating stop-motion animation. Which this is, at least aesthetically, hand crafted models being the heart of all things. It isn't the reason I am having a ball, but it is the wonderful visual backdrop to having a ball. Regardless of how its construction floats (or doesn't) your boat, the animation sings.
So far, the game has had limited puzzling, consisting mainly of task-based bits and pieces, but it is driving the narrative forward. There has also been a fair bit of wandering and wondering and doing things that aren't essential to the game (at least as far as I can tell at this stage), but add a degree of depth, and even more things to do just because.
Harold is a bit of a hapless soul, and the butt of jokes as a result, but I suspect there is a strength or at least a doggedness there that will come to the surface as things progress. We will wait and see.
Objectives are in your PDA, move around with the WASD keys and interact using the keyboard (no mouse). Scenes generally slide left and right as Harold explores, and cutscenes punctuate events. Enjoy your first ride on the water tubes that function as 'lifts,' chat with others (some responses are time limited) and the game (exclusively) saves at regular intervals.
We have just had a startling revelation, and I look forward to how it will play out.