Insomniac Games spent the 2010s building Ratchet & Clank worlds and Spider-Man swinging, so a quiet 2D dive into the ocean reads as a detour. Song of the Deep arrived in July 2016 on PlayStation 4, Windows and Xbox One, published by GameStop under its GameTrust label — the retail chain’s first move into publishing. The game follows Merryn, a 12-year-old girl who builds a submarine to find her missing father.
Trailer, via PlayStation.
Merryn’s Submarine and the Fisherman’s Tales
The setup is simple and warm. Merryn loves her father, a fisherman, mostly for the tall tales he brings home. When he vanishes at sea, she has a vision of him trapped at the bottom of the ocean. She builds a sub and gear, then sets out — and finds that a lot of what he told her was true.
That turn is the best thing Song of the Deep has going for it. The father’s stories become the map. What looked like invention turns out to be geography, and the game lets that idea carry the exploration rather than spelling it out.
Play is a two-dimensional side-scroller in the Metroidvania style. Sections of the world stay closed until Merryn finds improvements for herself and her equipment. Enemies can hurt her, but combat is not the point. Exploration and puzzle solving are, with real attention paid to how objects behave underwater. Currents, weight and buoyancy do the work that a sword would do elsewhere.
Siobhan Hewlett and the Narrator
A narrator describes Merryn’s progress and what she sees, voiced by Siobhan Hewlett. It is a smart fit for a game about a child alone in deep water, and it keeps the player inside her point of view instead of watching from outside.
The narration also papers over a thinness. Merryn is the only character with any presence, and the father exists mostly as a memory and a destination. When the voice has to carry the emotional weight, the story leans hard on it.
What the Depths Actually Deliver
The underwater physics are the game’s real argument. Puzzle rooms ask you to think about how a heavy object falls, how a current moves it, how Merryn’s sub handles in tight space. That is more interesting than another enemy to hit, and it gives the side-scrolling a reason to exist beyond nostalgia for the genre.
Where Song of the Deep falls short is scale. Metroidvania games live on the promise that the map keeps opening, and this one opens politely rather than generously. The improvements arrive, the paths unblock, and the loop holds — but it rarely surprises you twice with the same trick. The father’s tales turning real is a fine hook, and the game does not quite build a second one behind it.
| Release window | Platform |
|---|---|
| July 2016 | PlayStation 4 |
| July 2016 | Windows |
| July 2016 | Xbox One |
Key facts
– Score: 6.9/10
– Developer: Insomniac Games
– Publisher: GameTrust Games
– Released: July 2016
– Platforms: PlayStation 4, PC (Microsoft Windows), Xbox One
– Genre: action-adventure, Metroidvania
– Mode: single player
– Narrator: Siobhan Hewlett
Song of the Deep is a good small game from a studio that usually builds big ones, and that contrast is most of its charm. It treats the ocean as a puzzle box and a child’s grief as the thing that opens it. The underwater logic is the part worth your time; the combat and the map are the parts you tolerate to get there. Insomniac proved it could slow down. The next step would have been to give Merryn someone to talk back to.
Get the Notebook.
The day's best stories and every fresh verdict, in plain English, in your inbox by seven. One email a day, no more.
