The Sea Eternal Demo

One of the most popular myths around the world concerns the existence of beautiful sea creatures called mermaids, which are actually half human and half fish. They are usually not that nice to meet, on the other hand, given the fact that their primary occupation seems to be leading ships into rocks and killing everyone in the process.

The Sea Eternal is a text-based adventure game with role-playing elements and a pretty rich background story, in which you get to make all the decisions and customize your character’s journey. As the name clearly implies, the action revolves around mythological sea creatures, although they are pretty different from the ones you usually hear about in tales.

To begin with, you play the role of a mermaid trying to save its kin from being punished by the whales, after one of the other mermaids goes rogue and threatens to expose the merfolk. In this case, the whales know the secret to immortality, which is why it’s important for you to keep them from taking it away. Granted, your decisions can lead to many other endings, which is why it’s great to replay the experience and see things from a different perspective.

Although adventure games such as this one typically allow you to choose a course whenever a decisive scene approaches, The Sea Eternal is a bit more strict in this regard. As such, future decisions depend on your past ones, which means that some options are grayed out. This kind of removes your ability to change the story on the go, because the game basically forces you onto a path from the beginning.

The best part about interactive text adventures is that everything is up to you, which is not exactly true in this case. While the story is pretty solid writing and dialog-wise, the illusion of choice kind of ruins the experience after a while. The lack of graphics becomes more annoying because of this, which is not a problem in the rest of the games like this.

In the end, The Sea Eternal can still be a great story to hear and play through, but it really feels like you do not actually have a choice. Hence, this is more like a kinetic visual novel, except for the visual part.