Beyond Blue

What the game is

Beyond Blue is a narrative diving game, eight dives long. You are Mirai, a marine scientist leading a small research team in the near future. E-Line Media released it in June 2020 and built it with BBC Studios, the team behind Blue Planet II, together with OceanX Media and working ocean researchers.

Each dive drops you into open water with a scanner and a set of animals to find. There is no combat, no oxygen meter, and nothing chasing you. Between dives you are back on the boat, talking with your crew, and sixteen short documentaries unlock as you go: real footage and interviews with ocean scientists, which the game calls Ocean Insights. A licensed soundtrack plays over the water and a photo mode saves the pictures. It runs on PC, console, and mobile; the mobile version is free to download and charges once to unlock the full game.

What you actually do

You swim. Holding a direction moves Mirai through open water, and a scanner picks out animals at a distance. Scanning one adds it to your log and usually triggers a line of narration about what the animal is doing. Dives carry loose objectives, such as finding a particular whale or following a pod, but you can ignore them and drift instead. Between dives, video calls from family and colleagues carry the story forward and new Ocean Insights become available. Getting better means recognizing animals before you scan them and knowing where in the water column to look. The game never fails you. The only thing you can waste is the chance to see something.

What it exercises

• Identifies marine animals by shape, movement, and depth in the water
• Uses a scanning tool to gather observations before drawing a conclusion
• Connects a documentary explanation to an animal seen minutes earlier
• Follows a slow-moving subject patiently instead of chasing a score
• Treats underwater sound as information rather than background

Why we rate it Low Worksheet score 43 / 100

1. FitHow much real knowledge or skill does the play itself make you use?45weight 45%

   Fit reaches 45 because looking is the whole verb: you progress only by finding and scanning animals, so attention to shape and behavior is exactly what the game asks for. It stays mid-table because the documentary segments that carry the real science sit outside the play, as videos watched between dives rather than anything worked out during a dive itself.

2. TransferWill what you practise here work outside the game?50weight 30%

   Transfer sits at 50, higher than the other two, because a player who has spent hours identifying animals underwater reads an aquarium label differently afterward, and the documentary clips attach real names and real scientists to what was just seen. It is not higher because the game asks for recognition, not reasoning, and nothing checks whether you understood why an animal behaves as it does.

3. PracticeDoes the game make you use that skill again and again, as it gets harder?30weight 25%

   Practice is the weak point at 30. Eight dives give the identify-and-scan loop some time to become familiar, and species recur across dives, so you meet the same animal again in a new place. But once the story finishes the dives can be replayed with nothing new added, so the repetition has a clear and fairly early end.

What the evidence says

Editorial onlyNobody outside our desk has checked this. It is our reading of how the game plays.

The evidence level is Editorial only, and deliberately conservative. Two sources describe a study that used Beyond Blue as a pro-environmental attitude intervention, published through a university repository and a conference metadata page. That work measures attitudes shortly after play in a small sample, not whether a player learns marine biology from the dives. The official pages and the Steam listing confirm the production partners, BBC Studios, OceanX, and working scientists, and the sixteen documentary clips. What is said here about curiosity and attention follows from the play loop itself, not from that study, which is why the level stays editorial rather than research-backed.

• Gameful interventions for pro-environmental attitude change ↗ · Australian National University repository
• Evaluating the Impact of Gameful Design on Pro-Environmental Attitudes: Beyond Blue as Intervention ↗ · Conference metadata page