Vellamar, forty metres down
A working coastal city of about ninety thousand, built on reclaimed ground by people who knew it was reclaimed ground and built anyway. It had a harbour, a cannery, a tram line that ran badly, two football clubs that hated each other, and a sea wall everyone agreed was somebody else's budget line. On the night of the ninth it went under in about four hours. Almost everyone got out. Almost.
"The wall did not fail on the night of the ninth. The wall failed in 2011 and took four years to finish doing it.
"From the public inquiry
Four districts, four kinds of silence
The city is not a level select and it is not open world either. Four districts, each one a hand authored space of maybe forty rooms, and you choose which to work and in what order. They do not scale to you, they do not reshuffle, and once you have stripped a room it stays stripped across every future dive. The city is a finite resource. So is your patience with it.
The Terraces
Housing on the slope, the last part to go under and the part where people had time to pack. What is left was left on purpose.
The Spires
Offices and the two banks. Ledgers, contracts, and the paperwork that says exactly whose budget line the wall was.
The Cannery
Empty since 2013. Two years of rot before the water, which makes it the strangest place in the city to salvage.
The Tunnels
The tram line. Nobody died here, and the game makes you spend a long time being unsure of that.
Vellamar is not on a map and is not modelled on any real city or any real flood. It is invented whole, and the studio has been explicit that it is not about a specific disaster.
2400objects authored by hand, zero procedurally generated
4districts, roughly 160 rooms, all finite