Разработчик: Paleontology
Описание
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SeaBed_Audio_Novel_Collection
About the Game
SeaBed is a critically acclaimed yuri-themed mystery visual novel told through the perspectives of three separate characters: Mizuno Sachiko, a designer plagued by hallucinations of her past lover; Narasaki Hibiki, Sachiko's friend and a psychiatrist researching the workings of human memories; and Takako, Sachiko's former lover who has been rapidly forgetting her past, including how or why the two women drifted apart despite being together since childhood.
All three live in different worlds, but seek the same goal. To separate truth from illusion. To make sense of their own lives.
The Steam version of SeaBed has been updated to natively support 1440x1080 resolution.
Characters:
"At times, I'd wake up at night and hear all the sounds around me as if they were amplified. I'd feel like my head could burst at any second."
Although she moved to Tokyo straight after graduating university in order to seek employment, Mizuno Sachiko soon quit her job to establish Clover Design with her childhood friend Takako, becoming its young CEO.
Her main hobby is reading, but only because nothing else manages to interest her. Although Sachiko used to be quite an avid reader during her school years, finding a job means she now only opens a book every once in a while, whenever her schedule allows it.
After meeting Takako – an inexhaustible source of enthusiasm, as well as a stark contrast to her own personality – during her childhood years, Sachiko’s interests began to shift to whatever the other woman was doing at a given time.
"This is as good a time as any, so let's check it out."
Endlessly interested in and enthusiastic about the world, Takako gives the impression of a woman perpetually stuck in her childhood.
She fell in love with Sachiko at first sight back when they first met at the age of five. However, she does not identify as a homosexual, stressing that Sachiko simply happened to be a woman.
Takako discovers that she suffers from developmental amnesia, a condition that severely impairs her ability to recall many of her memories.
"I just like observing people."
A psychiatrist at Narasaki Mental Clinic. She was Sachiko's classmate and friend during her elementary school years, but the two drifted apart as they enrolled in different middle schools. After learning that Sachiko has been experiencing hallucinations, she takes it upon herself to treat her.
She is extremely picky about her brand of coffee, perhaps because the beverage serves as her sole companion during those long hours spent immersed in research.
Though not religious, she is a strong believer that everything happens for a reason, and all things have their place and order in the grand scheme of the world.
Поддерживаемые языки: english, japanese, korean, simplified chinese, traditional chinese
Системные требования
Windows
- OS *: Windows 7/8/10/11
- Processor: Intel Pentium 2.0GHz or higher
- Memory: 2 GB RAM
- Sound Card: DirectSound compatible sound card
Отзывы пользователей
I took me multiple tries/false starts to get into it, but it was definitely worth it. It's a kinetic novel - no choices - but like any good mystery it pushes you to figure things out on your own. It never really feels like you're just along for the ride. Enough clues are fed to you each chapter to keep you engaged. The story will feel disjointed, dreamlike, or even nonsensical at times. Just keep at it - it's like that for a reason.
What makes this all work out, though, are the characters. They're complex and well-written. And just as importantly, they're not just agents in the mystery, they *are* the mystery. Even more trivial moments in the story feel important because by learning more about the characters, you get a better understanding of everything.
PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE, do play it slowly. Do not rush through the story, and it will hit so much better. I have been crying cuz i didnt want it to end but all good things come to an end.
10/10 story, really surprised at how emotional it is
this is such a wild and great ride. i come for a fluff, ended up with a trauma. everything is great, character, story (it is a slow burn story, you are playing detective with wtf is going in, especially if you hoping for certain thing to be true/not be true), world building, plot twist (fck man ... that last chapter, i cried like a little kid the whole time i read it)
Masterpiece
The lack of dialogue tags supplements the theme of dreams and memories; vague, half-forgotten and murky things, mingling and entangling with the past, future, and present, unsure of what is what, in an ever-changing kaleidoscopic shape. Don't worry too much about "who exactly is saying what." If it's not stated then it's something that is not necessary.
The most common complaint I see about SeaBed is about the pacing, and I've had issues with that with some other stuff, so I was a little worried. It actually turned out to be something I really appreciated about it. They really take their time exploring the characters and their relationships and the world and give you plenty of time to wonder about what's going on, and I never felt like it was wasting my time. For something about memory that uses dreams frequently it fits perfectly for it to be nonlinear and linger for a while on certain things while jumping right past others and maintaining that sort of hazy sense of ambiguity.
I also liked how long it took me to even decide what sort of genre conventions it was operating under. I had multiple reasonable guesses for which it could turn out to be and multiple plausible explanations for the various unusual elements and inconsistencies in different people's stories from different points of view. None of them ended up being entirely right, but it's open-ended and ambiguous enough about enough things that none of them were entirely wrong either.
I wasn't completely satisfied with the last few chapters, but I'm not really sure why or what I would've wanted more/less of or just to be different. But that doesn't mean I was unsatisfied either, just that I liked the journey a bit more than the destination.
Narasaki is my favourite character of all time.
This yuri visual novel is a masterpiece.
It has really likable interesting characters, chief among the game's central couple of Takako and Sachiko. You find yourselves caring deeply about the characters from the get-go, and then they end up embroiled in a mystery that you desperately want to understand because you care so much about them.
The mystery is expertly crafted, with each chapter of the story unveiling just enough for you to understand things a little bit more, but it keeps you reading because you often end up having plenty of questions with each piece of new information you learn. While it's a kinetic novel with no choices, it feels surprisingly interactive, because you frequently find yourselves stopping and trying to piece everything together.
It's also incredibly well-written, with an amazing translation.
I'll start by saying that I originally got this game through... other means. However, after finishing it I didn't just want ot buy it. I felt the need to.
Even after I quickly fast forward through the text to get some playtime, all the scenes, all the memories from the game came back to me.
It made me cry again.
This VN is such a masterpiece of literature. And the mystery is SO GOOD. I cannot express with words just how utterly I got played. Not just the first twist, but the second, too!
Everything from this story is expertly crafted to deal the most emotional damage. The use of stock images for its backgrounds created a feeling of melanchony (Search liminal images for more details), that kept me alert throughout the game for any type of hint.
and it did. I had a massive board of theories, and only 1/3 ended up being correct. I think part of how much it hurt was how hard I got played. ahah.
I would gladly worship the ground the writers walked on. That's how good it was.
Despite it barely even qualifying as a "video game", it's got its place as my 6th favorite game ever made
The new Unity version finally does not max out CPU usage on wine (Linux) :) Before this I had to extract game resources and use open-source krkrsdl2 to run this...
And SeaBed itself is a long and well-written story that worth reading if you have time.
Profoundly moving story; an indispensable yuri visual novel on Steam amidst a marsh of inane releases with little depth and merit.
10/10
Wonderful, mature and well-written mystery yuri novel. The slow paced buildup leading to a particular scene near the end really got to me.
Art is beautiful and the sound/ost really sets the mood for each scene. It's a fairly chill read with loveable characters.
Writing is great with my only complaint being that due to it being told closer to a proper book style, which is perfectly fine, there aren't names displayed or sprites telling who is speaking. I had lost track a few times of who was saying what line even going back to check if I missed some context. That said the few times that happened to me didn't impact my enjoyment or understanding of the story.
As of this writing I had finished reading Seabed quite awhile ago, and the PC version just got updated to include the extra epilogue scenes from the Switch version and in-game viewers for the extra story dlcs. Plus the lovely sidebars!
If you don't mind a more traditional writing style/presentation then I highly reccomend reading Seabed. Doubly so for fans of Yuri.
Easily my favourite VN and by extension book, extremely well done in terms of writing, natural character interactions and music with respect for conveying a serious story devoid of tonally inappropriate juvenile/sexual humour and melodrama typical in anime in favour of a true-to-life romance/conflict resolution which is relatable on many different levels. Overall, a memorable book I reminisce occasionally even after finishing it years ago.
Nothing like SeaBed as it's one of a kind, but these are worth checking out if you’re looking for the aforementioned qualities. Limited to 1 per medium:
Happy Ending story
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.
Дополнительная информация
| Разработчик | Paleontology |
| Платформы | Windows |
| Ограничение возраста | Нет |
| Дата релиза | 15.01.2025 |
| Отзывы пользователей | 95% положительных (112) |