In Other Waters

What the game is

In Other Waters is a science-fiction adventure released in 2020, made by Jump Over The Age and published by Fellow Traveller. You are not the diver. You are the artificial intelligence installed in a diving suit worn by a xenobiologist named Ellery Vas, on an ocean planet called Gliese 667Cc.

There is no three-dimensional world on screen. The whole game is an instrument panel: a compass ring, depth and power gauges, a node map of the seafloor drawn in a few flat colors, and a column of text where Ellery reports what she sees. Colored dots are life. Lines are currents. A soft synthesizer score and the click of dials carry the atmosphere instead of pictures.

The game is single player and sold on Steam for PC. Steam lists English, Japanese and Simplified Chinese. There is no combat, no timer and no way to die; the store page describes a non-violent experience about exploring, cataloging species and uncovering an environmental and a personal mystery.

What you actually do

Every action is a click on the interface. You choose a heading and dive, the suit moves, and its power drains. At a node you run a scan, and if something registers you take a sample. Back at the base station you put the sample through the lab, which gives it a name and a place in a growing taxonomy, and you read Ellery's notes on what it eats, where it lives and what it may be related to.

The loop tightens as evidence accumulates. A creature cataloged early explains an anomaly met later. Upgrades such as a longer-range scanner open regions that were closed. Getting better means reading the map as a system rather than a list of destinations: what lives where, what that implies about currents and food, and which unexplored node is worth the power it costs to reach.

What it exercises

• Sorts unfamiliar organisms into a taxonomy using traits recorded from samples
• Reads an abstract instrument display instead of a picture to work out surroundings
• Plans routes across a node map under a limited power budget
• Connects a specimen found in one region to conditions observed in another
• Follows a long written narrative and holds earlier details for later use

Why we rate it Low Worksheet score 40 / 100

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

   Fit lands at 45. Classifying is the game rather than a side activity: you cannot progress without sampling, filing and cross-referencing what you find, and the taxonomy screen is where the story actually unlocks. The number stays in the middle of the scale because the organisms are entirely invented, so the sorting is real practice performed on fictional material with nothing underneath it.

2. TransferWill what you practise here work outside the game?35weight 30%

   Transfer sits at 35. The habits are portable in shape: notice a trait, compare it with a known case, place the new thing in a group, revise when new evidence arrives, and that is close to what a biology class asks for. What does not transfer is content, since no real species, groupings or ecological data appear anywhere in the game.

3. PracticeDoes the game make you use that skill again and again, as it gets harder?35weight 25%

   Practice reaches 35. The scan, sample and file cycle repeats across the whole game, and the taxonomy keeps growing, so the same act of comparison recurs many times within one playthrough. What holds the number down is length: the story ends, there is no procedural mode, and there is little reason to start again once the mystery has resolved.

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. The Steam store page confirms the developer, publisher, release year, platform, languages and the shape of the play loop: an artificial intelligence guiding a xenobiologist who dives, samples and catalogs alien life. The page says nothing about learning. We have located no study of this game and cite none. The meaningfulness case is a reading of what the mechanics require a player to do, comparing traits, grouping specimens and revising a classification as evidence accumulates. Whether that habit shows up in a biology class is a reasonable expectation, not a measured result.

• https://store.steampowered.com/app/890720/ ↗