How a dive actually works
A dive is twenty to forty minutes and it does not save. You pick a district, you drop, and everything after that is one continuous take. The submersible has three things: a lamp, a manipulator arm, and eight cargo slots. It has no weapons, no sonar upgrade tree, no hull to lose. You are never in danger of dying and that is deliberate, because the moment a game can kill you it becomes a game about not dying, and this one needs to be about something else.
Lamp
34 minutes of charge, drains faster on playback
Slots
8, fixed, no upgrades, ever
Playback
40 to 90 seconds each, costs lamp
Saving
On surfacing only. A dive is one take
Death
Not implemented
Drop → Survey → Open → Choose → Surface
Five verbs, no others. Every system in the game is one of these five wearing a different coat.
The lamp is the clock
Thirty four minutes of charge, and playback burns it. That is the whole tension. Every memory you watch is time you are not spending finding a better object, and the objects do not announce themselves. A wedding ring and a bottle opener look identical under silt until you touch them. So you spend light to learn what something is, and learning what it is is also the reward, which means the game is constantly charging you for the thing you came for.
Playback can be cut short. You will not know what you interrupted, and the object keeps whatever you did not hear.
An object taken is an object gone. There is no return trip to a room you have already stripped.
What the manipulator arm can hold
• A ring, a key, a coin, a photograph
• A ledger, a letter, a school report
• A radio, a music box, anything with a battery left in it
• A door handle, if you are the kind of player who does that
• One thing at a time, into one slot, permanently
Why the objects fight back without fighting
Vellamar was a real working city and the salvage reflects it. A shop ledger is worth more to the archive than a wedding ring, because the archive is a public record and the historians who read it want to know who owed what. But the ring has a person in it. The game never tells you which is correct. It only tells you, at the surface, what the archive concluded from the eight things you chose, and it says it flatly, without judgement, which turns out to be worse.
"Tester spent nineteen minutes of lamp on one radio and surfaced with three empty slots. Asked why. Said she wanted to hear the end of it. That is the game working.
"Playtest note
The one memory rule
Every object holds exactly one memory and gives it exactly once. Not a branching tree, not a collectible set, not a lore drip you can grind. One. The first time you touch it. If your lamp dies mid playback, that memory is spent and you heard what you heard. This was the most argued about decision in the build and it shipped unchanged.
Objects in the city
About 2400 authored, no procedural fill
Objects with memories
All of them
Voiced
31 performers, mostly non professional
Objects you can carry in one run
8