These Darker Tides, by Pixel Drip Games brings you into the claustrophobic terror of an undersea station, where you are employed to monitor five cameras, watching for shark attacks on company pipes. This sinister job simulator is set in a world with excellent sound and photorealistic graphics, where the horror and frantic action is realistic, as well as uniquely unsettling.
You appear in front of a terminal in a grimly sufficient room that is clearly deep underwater. The company message appears with a tinny fanfare and day one begins. You fire flares or soundwaves from the cameras and try the paper toss game, then the camera alarm sounds as chaos slowly begins.
And it is eerily convincing. The greyscale fish and unidentifiable dark blobs on the submerged cameras are the most instantly striking thing about the game. I at least, have never seen such realistic underwater footage in a game before. The cubicle is dark and utilitarian – a steel toilet and necessary-looking escape hatch take care of that; only the screen and camera ports are worth looking at. And so you look. The flares, (which fire without any sound, a nice touch I thought), illuminate the murky water as they slowly go out, showing for an instant the creature chewing your precious pipe. Time has been taken to add minute details to complete the illusion: the calendar on the wall of the cubicle, the floating marine debris. Only a few rapidly turning fish and hollow character parts can be faulted.
A lot of effort has also been made to design the sounds inside the underwater station. The bumps and scrapes and growling of monsters are the obvious ones, but also the satisfying camera-fix noise, the sound of ghosts and the authentic-feeling alarms. The murmur of water trickling into your station is unsettling, and will stay with me.
The gameplay is odd at first, cycling between views of the sea floor and repairing cameras. It does add to a (completely justified) sense of foreboding, when you doubt that this is all you are “employed” to do. But it does motivate you to protect the station and push through any amount of abominations and madness to get that “employee of the day” award. You find yourself rationalising thoughts like; “I should fire flares through all the broken cameras before I deal with the monster in the airlock”.
Puzzles must be solved to do many of the game actions, and all station repairs. They are press-button-exactly-now puzzles with a mechanical feel, like pressing space when a dial is in a certain spot or when a moving box is inside another moving box. These are given weight by the panic-inducing situation in the submerged cubicle and the fact that your life often depends on them. I am, unfortunately, terrible at them and avoided them when I could. You can see through a broken camera, sort of, but more urgent issues could not be dodged. They do feel like ‘work’, in keeping with the job mechanic, and are satisfying to complete.
More obvious signposting of puzzle solutions would have been appreciated, by me at least. A certain camera had to be aimed at ghosts and triggered after a “lock-on” noise had sounded. This was not made clear to me, and I died as I lived, confusedly looking for ghosts, many many times.
The controls are simple, though not always easy. I would have liked a quick one-button way to stop repairing a camera and get back to the terminal. Some of the red lights and sirens were ambiguous and did not indicate what was going wrong. As mentioned earlier, some explicit direction would have saved me the concentrated frustration I had with some parts of this game.
Though many were reported, I did not see any bugs, other than some puzzle sound effects chiming after the puzzle had been exited. Pixel Drip Games are actively responding to players, patching the camera-repair puzzles difficulty level, one annoying alarm, and the reported bugs.
The reason this eight-hour game works so well, I think, is psychological. There are jump scares but the game is not based around them; the job you are doing drives you forward and you notice non-critical things in passing like, “that fish had hands”. The creatures shaking the cameras and ramming the station become normal and as the heavily foreshadowed but unspecified horror appears, you finish your shift, and feel proud that you protected the company pipes.
These Darker Tides sets a uniquely threatening underwater atmosphere, and then makes good on those threats. While both a great horror title and a great time management job simulator, it is unlike anything in either genre. In-game puzzles can be frustrating, but that feeling of doom and submersion really is something special and should be experienced by all.
Game information
Our Verdict:
A brilliantly executed horror/job simulator that knows how to build atmosphere, [I]These Darker Tides[/i] is constantly surprising, and leads to outstanding game endings. The timing puzzles can be obtuse but do not spoil the experience.
The Good:
- Unique game premise executed excellently
- Great visuals
- Frighteningly good sound design
- Threatening atmosphere integrated into the plot
- Multiple unlockable game endings
- Jump scares and unpredictable game events
The Bad:
- Unclear puzzle solutions
- Some ambiguous alarms
- Moderately short
GAME INFO
These Darker Tides is an adventure game by Pixel Drip Games released in 2025 for PC. It has a Photographic style, presented in Full 3D and is played in a First-Person perspective.
