I haven't seen anyone really saying the actual story of SeaBed is lackluster, rather its often just slow and a bit mundane, and I think the relative positivity echoes that both in steam reviews and outside reviews, so rather than restating other reviews, I'll instead talk about what got me through this game. It's always the more abstract stories that affect me the deepest. Oneshot, Omori, Signalis, Silent Hill 2, Fromsoftware's entire modern catalog, Hollow Knight, so on and so forth. Complicated narratives that draw you in from their initial surface level glimpses at a far deeper story lying within. Some are more abstract, some are less so, but the sense of mystery of "what happened here?" is far more compelling to me than most other story elements. I'm fascinated by things like that, even the simple lore of Ultrakill, spanning likely no more than a few pages, is enough to get the gears turning in my brain enough to lock down memories about it. While SeaBed had this mystery element to it, it's incredibly far outside of the types of stories I usually consume. Me rattling off games at the top probably already gave it away, but I'm not usually one for VNs, slow-paced stories, or even reading in general- I've almost resigned myself to not being able to properly read books anymore, and I've seen few VNs that grabbed my interest, much less ones I saw through to the end. I usually just look at summaries and analyses for that kind of stuff. Even besides that, it doesn't at all seem like a genre of story I would remotely enjoy. I am a sucker for good stories though, regardless of medium, so when a youtube reviewer I watch (shoutout to Amelie Doree) said it may have changed how they thought about fiction in general, I felt like it was something I shouldn't miss. I initially, we'll say, "obtained" the switch version of the game in order to test the waters, and it was to both my shock and curiosity that the story was not only intriguing enough for me to want to continue it after purchasing on steam, but compelling enough to want to continue not even halfway through the prologue, which if you've read it yourself, is quite literally before anything major starts happening. Something about SeaBed's writing style worms its way into your head. I'm writing this shortly after having finished it, and I have a hunch I'll be thinking about it for a long time to come. I disagree with the notion that it feels "padded", or has pacing issues. Yes, this is quite possibly the slowest-paced story I think I have ever consumed, and perhaps will ever consume. As the quoted review on the store page says, it's in no hurry to get anywhere with its writing. The writing, while slow, is so meticulously detailed that it almost seems like it leaves no room for interpretation. By the end of the game, when a place was mentioned, I often thought about it in relation to other places that came up. Characters were fleshed out in such detail that despite the story only taking me around 17 hours to read through, they felt more developed than many multi-season TV shows or 100+ hour games. Backgrounds are constructed out of filtered photos and 3d renders, and while that's something I sometimes see criticized in other VNs as feeling cheaper, it works well here. The text will reference objects in the backgrounds and the background will slightly change in lighting or coloration as needed. I've made guesses on the plot based on what I was seeing in backgrounds that turned out to be correct, multiple times. Perhaps paradoxically, SeaBed's story is incredibly confusing at first and had me taking physical notes of multiple small details I thought might be relevant later and going back and rereading previous chapters to check if a connection I saw was really there. It's completely at odds with much of the story's writing style. The backgrounds, pace and prose all congeal together to form a dreamy yet mildly tense atmosphere I don't think I've experienced anywhere else; there are no better words for it than just "it's a vibe and a half". It doesn't neatly fit any genre, even the ones that it's marketed under, and it uses the medium well for all this. Any more textual like a light novel or book and the story would lose the often ambient, nostalgic soundtrack and sound effects that aid scenes without visuals. Any more visual like a manga or anime and you'd lose the complex descriptions that help you understand a character far deeper than initially thought. SeaBed isn't for everyone, and it's not trying to be. There is an ending, one that I found satisfying, but a lot of events through the overarching plot are up for interpretation. There's moments, details, and motifs I wrote down that kept popping up, yet at the end of everything don't have concrete reasons for existing. In this regard, it's up to the reader to determine their importance, and I think trying to make them neatly fit in somewhere would be antithetical to the way this story flowed. If I thought something was important and someone else's interpretation ended up convincing me that it was simply being mundane, I don't think it would bother me on a lot of points; the journey of reading it still left me in an atmosphere I enjoyed in the moment, that's just the kind of story it is. If you don't think you'd enjoy reading this yourself, be it the pace or the interpretive angle, that's okay. For me though, it's a work of art I won't soon forget, and has been added to my ever growing list of fascinating, compelling, and resonant stories, which is all I ever really could have asked it for. I will now return to sobbing.
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