Founded in 1998, Blade Interactive was an English development studio formed from the collapse of Mirage Technologies (Multimedia), the studio best known for the legendarily infamous Rise of the Robots, and at first Blade made its name developing billiards & snooker games, most notably the World Championship Snooker series. Aside from the occasional racing game, namely Room Zoom & G-Surfers/HSX: Hypersonic.Xtreme, billiards/snooker was really all that Blade Interactive worked on, but one of its staff (Huw Lloyd) was also working on something interesting: The Hydro Engine. As the name says, the Hydro Engine was all about allowing water to be treated like a realistic & dynamic fluid in a video game environment, including being able to both fill enclosed spaces & drain out of openings in said spaces. Understandably, this sounded like an awesome bit of tech to work with, so it was decided to create a game that could take full advantage of the Hydro Engine, but at the same time Blade Interactive technically didn't want its name associated with this. Instead, this game was developed by a studio called Dark Energy Digital, and while it was never outright stated it looks as though Blade simply outright changed its name to Dark Energy, as according to the Wayback Machine Blade's website more or less stopped existing after 2008, while Dark Energy's website started up in 2009; also, Dark Energy did make at least one snooker game, continuing Blade's legacy.
First revealed at the start of 2007, Hydrophobia would eventually be announced for release in March 2009 as a traditional retail release, but wound up getting hit with various delays before getting changed to a timed exclusive for Xbox 360 that Microsoft Studios even published itself via Xbox Live Arcade on September 29, 2010. Though what was released was actually just the first part of a three-episode series (which was a common way of releasing digital games, at the time), initial critical reception towards Hydrophobia was only mixed at best, and while creative director/designer Pete Jones, who was also part of Dark Energy's PR team & even credited as creating the original story of the game's narrative, admitted that it was difficult to accept the negative reception, he said that everyone at Dark Energy would do everything they could to improve the game; again, this guy was a producer for Rise of the Robots, so he certainly had experience with this kind of reaction. To Dark Energy's credit, three months later the game received an update on December 21, 2010 dubbed Hydrophobia Pure (though it's never stated as such in-game) which featured all manner of fixes & changes, including ones to the controls, physics, mechanics, camera & map systems, & it even removed superfluous dialogue in some cutscenes. Not content with just that, Dark Energy would then release a third version of the game, titled Hydrophobia Prophecy, for PlayStation 3 & Windows (via Steam), which the studio considered a "Version 1.5" that included a bunch of brand new additions & changes that weren't in Pure; the Windows version first saw release on May 9, 2011, while the PS3 version wouldn't come out until November 1, 2011. Unfortunately, all of this hard work wouldn't pay off, as Dark Energy Digital would close its doors on March 19, 2012. While sales numbers were never revealed for any version of Hydrophobia, leaderboards revealed only 24,532 people ever completed the game on 360 by January 2011, just four months after the initial release & roughly one month after the Pure update. Checking the leaderboards nowadays show just over 205,000 people overall on Xbox & just over 100,000 on PS3, but that's after another decade+ of sales; still, those aren't exactly the numbers Dark Energy was hoping for, I imagine.
However, & most interestingly enough, Hydrophobia has managed to not disappear into the ether & become delisted, as the 360 version is not only still available for sale (for $9.99, though it's gone on sale once in a while) but was even added to the backwards compatibility list for Xbox One (& later Xbox Series) on February 26, 2019, meaning that you can play it with improved performance & the like when compared to playing it on the 360. Meanwhile, the Windows version of Prophecy is also still available for sale over on Steam (for just $4.99), though the PS3 version has since been delisted from the PS Store, though I did purchase it long ago. In fact, the leaderboards show that four other people besides me have played the game on PS3 over the past week of me playing this for review... & I only got second place for the entire campaign; curse you, PolarPhantom! The rights to Hydrophobia are now with Cherry Pop Games, a Manchester-based studio (just like Blade & Dark Energy) that has some of the same staff, like Pete Jones; Cherry Pop even makes billiards & snooker games! So let's go over Hydrophobia (Pure) & Hydrophobia Prophecy, see how they differ (& which one is arguably better), & decide if this game is more deservedly unfinished tech demo or if it's actually better than expected.
Kate Wilson is a systems engineer working on the Queen of the World, a massive ocean liner the size of a small city that's currently having a massive party outside her apartment celebrating 10 years of service. After waking up from a nightmare, Kate soon sees that all of the systems in her apartment have gone offline, contacting her friend/co-worker Chief Scot "Scoot" McGraw if he knew anything about it. Despite effectively having the day off for the celebration, Kate decides to investigate on her own, in case of a security breach. Her hunch is correct, as the Queen of the World is suddenly attacked by a terrorist group calling themselves the Neo-Malthusians, who follow the beliefs of Thomas Malthus & feel that the only solution to the overpopulation of the world is genocide... and first & foremost is to sink the Queen of the World, the pride of Neocell, a major corporation that planned to make a major announcement at the party. One of the explosives used to breach one of the liner's hulls just happened to go off while Kate was in a nearby elevator, leaving her stranded deep within the liner's halls. Now Kate has to find a way back onto the deck of the Queen of the World, while also dealing with any Malthusians that get in her way.
Since this was eventually released as just the first part of a three-episode series of releases, it's no real surprise that Hydrophobia is a rather short game, with even a first time playthrough clocking in at no more than three hours, slightly more if you search high & low for the various documents & items strewn about for 100% completion. Still, the game actually kind of takes advantage of this by making each of the three acts that comprise its campaign feel somewhat unique between each other, while also acting as an advancement of the overall gameplay. Act 1 is solely about traversal, focusing on getting Kate from location to location, whether that be via walking, running, climbing, jumping, balancing across thin surfaces, & (of course) swimming, as well as introducing gameplay elements like hacking (done by using both analog sticks to match waveforms in what's actually a really cool little minigame), hunting for hidden encryption codes (& secret documents revealing quotations from Thomas Malthus), & remote accessing things like doors. Act 2 introduces combat via guns (primarily via sonic rounds that are infinite, but later giving you access to remote explosive gel rounds), using your environment to kill foes (blowing up gas cans, breaking open areas filled with water to drown or electrocute them, etc.), hacking into cameras to remote access things out of your normal view, & even purposefully flooding rooms to able to reach higher areas; there is also a cover system (a requisite for the era, honestly) & the ability to sneak, but stealth isn't really a focus. Finally, Act 3 is the shortest section of all, tasking the player with returning to prior sections (only now with much more flooding) before making it to the deck for the end, all the while getting some new ammo types (Semi-Auto, Energy, & Rapid Fire) to round things out.
In terms of gameplay, Hydrophobia plays mostly like how many third-person action/adventure games of the era did, which means that the controls are solid & easy to grasp. Movement is on the left analog stick (clicking it in makes Kate crouch), camera control is on the right stick, holding the left trigger lets you aim more accurately, the right trigger shoots (once you get a gun), the face buttons let you jump, interact with objects, & cling to a wall for cover, etc. If anything, Kate herself moves around a bit more loosely than, say, someone like Marcus Fenix in Gears of War, but that does make sense to a degree, as she's a systems engineer, not a trained soldier. Climbing around the environment is easy to do, while your health is done in the then-standard "regenerating health, complete with the screen getting greyer/darker as you're closer to death" style, but the game is rather generous with how much health you actually have; unless you're taking constant hits from multiple foes, you can survive a good while before dying via gunfire. Naturally, with a game focused very heavily on water there's also a focus on swimming, and thankfully that controls very easily & well here, too, though moving up & down via the face buttons can be a bit sudden, but nothing game breaking; there's even combat while underwater, which you'll have to balance without running out of air & drowning. The game also encourages the player to do more than simply shoot enemies directly, as everything gives you points, and you get a multiplier for destroying objects in a row & killing enemies via different means (explosion, electrocuting, immolating, drowning, etc.) in quick succession, alongside the usual points given for grabbing objects, reading documents, & discovering hidden messages; that's why there's even a leaderboard to look at.
After beating the main campaign you unlock the Challenge Room in the main menu, which is a large room that tasks the player to survive five waves of fights, with the goal being to maximize your final score by both finishing fast & dealing with enemies in varied ways... oh, and suddenly the game gives Kate the ability to directly control water. Yeah, from literally out of nowhere Kate now has hydrokinetic powers that allow her to create water pillars that can move objects, capture enemies, & crush them with a sudden release. The story that's told in the main campaign gives absolutely no hint of Kate even having any potential for psychic powers, so maybe this was something that Dark Energy was planning to include for the two episodes that were meant to come out, and the Challenge Room was simply the team's way of giving players a chance to experiment with it in advance; also, it makes for an easy & direct way to showcase the Hydro Engine. Speaking of the Hydro Engine, it really is an impressive bit of tech, both for its time & even today. In use alongside Havok for physics the end result is a game where you can see a small wave of water coming your way, and unless you hide behind a wall or turn into another room you will get hit with & knocked out for a short moment, while various objects like containers, gas canisters, & the like flow around rather realistically. Even movement is affected by the water, as once the water starts going above your knees & waist you start to slow down & are unable to jump, just like in real life. Being able to take out enemies by seeing a weak wall or glass & destroying it to unleash a sudden torrent of water never gets old, and though underwater combat isn't always ideal (due to you having limited air, while Malthusians can seemingly stay underwater as long as they unlike, unless they're knocked out) it is still a fun little twist that you really don't see, even today. While Hydrophobia could have simply been nothing more than a tech demo disguised as a game, Dark Energy Digital instead actually did put forth the effort to create an enjoyable game first, with the Hydro Engine instead acting as a way to deliver a unique experience in a genre that was otherwise produced ad nauseum at the time.
Of course, that's just looking at things from a purely gameplay perspective... because from a storytelling perspective Hydrophobia is rather weak. Sure, part of that comes from the very nature of it being only the first part of what was meant to be a three-episode series, but even from that perspective there really isn't much story told or even set up properly for future episodes to build on. The overall plot of his first episode is fine enough: It's all about Kate finding her way back to the deck of the Queen of the World, working with Scoot to throw a wrench in the Malthusians' plans by purposefully sabotaging sections of the liner that they're mysteriously defending (despite destroying the liner itself being the perfect way to fulfill their seeming goals), and then trying to find Scoot so that they can both escape. In terms of supporting cast there's really only two in Security Chief Billingham, who Kate rescues in the climax of Act 1 & then is never seen again until the literal final scene of Act 3, & Mila Krass, a Queen of the World employee who in reality is the person who snuck the Malthusians onto the liner & is their leader; aside from one cutscene early in Act 3, Mila is only ever referenced in documents you come across.
Quite frankly, it's the documents that really give you 99% of the lore & backstory of Hydrophobia, like establishing that the Queen of the World was created by a political group known as the Cornucopians, led by the "Five Founding Fathers", which is the idealistic rival to the Neo-Malthusians, or that Kate knew who Mila was beforehand due to Mila working as part of the kitchen staff (thereby seeing shock when she's revealed as the main villain), or even that Scoot is actually Kate's boss (he does refer to this via dialogue in Act 3 a couple of times, though). There's also a vaguely established prior trauma for Kate regarding what looks to be her little sister Jenny possibly drowning to death when they were kids, but aside from Kate referencing Jenny once early on (& the fact that when you get close & closer to drowning you start to hear a child laughing), it's not actually relevant in any way; maybe this would have tied into Kate getting hydrokinetic powers later on, but this is just a wild guess. Even the literal fear of water that the game seemingly takes its name from (despite that actually being aquaphobia, not hydrophobia, a.k.a. rabies) isn't thematically relevant in any way, plot-wise. If you're the kind of person who doesn't really care much for stuff like reading in-universe documents (even though the ones here are generally pretty short), then you'll wind up with a plot that's fine but otherwise simple, and a world that's ill defined. Finally, while it's understandable that "Episode 1" of a trilogy wouldn't have a proper "finale", Hydrophobia doesn't even have a "climax", instead ending after a relatively innocuous gunfight with some Malthusians, followed by a sudden cliffhanger where Kate & Billingham have to escape a sudden rush of water; Scoot's ultimate fate is left mystery, obviously left for what would have been "Episode 2".
Everything I just described so far is based solely on Hydrophobia Pure, or at least that's what I would guess is the version that downloaded to my Xbox Series X, but is it still possible to play "vanilla" Hydrophobia & see how different it is, at least without finding an archived version somewhere online & using an Xbox 360 emulator? I certainly gave it a try by downloading the game to my 360 & then disconnecting it from the internet, so that the console wouldn't try updating it once I booted it up. However, doing that resulted in me only being able to play the Trial/Demo version, despite having purchased it long ago (i.e. it needs to verify that I have access to the full version via an online check first), but I give it a go anyway since the trial is short & cane be finished in just 10-15 minutes... and it played more or less exactly the same as it did on Series X, minus the obvious drop in performance. So, just to be safe, I reconnect my 360 to the internet & boot back up the game... and it doesn't look for an update, meaning that Hydrophobia Pure is indeed the version that officially downloads now, and the only way to experience the game in its original, apparently busted form is by locating a preserved version of it somewhere & using an emulator. Since I already have an entirely other version of the game to cover, I'll just have to leave the "vanilla" version of Hydrophobia alone, just rely on old reviews to understand that it was seemingly really, really bad, & conclude that Hydrophobia Pure is very solid & enjoyable from a gameplay perspective, but super barebones from a story perspective.
So, only one thing remains: Hydrophobia Prophecy. What exactly does this PS3/PC take do differently from the Xbox 360 original, and how does it stack up against Hydrophobia Pure? In terms of differences, things are instantly seen just with the main menu, which uses a completely different (& much brighter) environment for its backdrop, and even checking the controls there are new additions, namely the addition of a roll mechanic (though it's not really needed or even all that useful), the ability to manually turn on the waypoint to your next objective, & even stealth kills (which I think I only ever got off once). Next, from the very first in-game cutscene it's blatantly obvious that the visuals have been updated, and in some cases even completely rehauled, like Kate's apartment looking much more colorful & brighter, whereas before it was a bit more muted & realistic. In fact, a lot of the environments are given a much brighter color grade to them, in general, so it's likely that there were a lot of complaints about the game being too drab and/or dark originally. Voice work has also been updated, as while Kate does say most of the same lines as before it sounds as though alternate takes were used for some lines. The biggest change for voice work, though, comes with Scoot... who's literally just a completely different character now.
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| Yes, these are seriously supposed to be the same guy across both versions of the game. It's the only time you ever see Scoot. |
Where in the 360 game he was a slightly pudgy Scotsman(?) with a heavy accent, Prophecy now changes him to a thinner, white, American guy, and (to be perfectly honest) is made all the worse for it. Supposedly, there were many complaints about Scoot's portrayal in the original version, whether it was following the seeming stereotype of "computer guy = fat/pudgy guy" or even his accent being so heavy that some apparently couldn't understand most of what he was saying, but to completely replace Scoot with someone else winds up in him now being made immensely generic & without any real charm. In fact, even having him still be called "Scoot" doesn't work, since this new guy certainly doesn't look like a "Scoot"; instead, he's more of a "Scott" than a "Scot". Sure, it might sound a wee bit stereotypical to say that a thick Scottish(?) accent equates to having more charm, but for what little we really get to know of the character I'll certainly take anything more than "generic white guy #18.0146" (that's the weight of a mole of water, by the way). At the very least, the in-game documents finally give Chief Billingham a first name (Chris), so that's a net positive... right?
Anyway, the biggest changes when it comes to Hydrophobia Prohecy are with the "stage" layouts (for lack of a better term) & the storytelling itself. For the former, while the overall progression of each Act in terms of where Kate goes is 100% the same exact thing, a number of the rooms & halls she goes through have now been modified, if not just 100% replaced with something completely different. For example, a room early in Act 2 originally jut had Kate shoot down some hanging wires to prevent electrocution while moving through a tight hall (something that was actually seen a few times in the OG game, but now only appears once), but now it's a giant server room that requires Kate to climb up to a second level, use pipes on the ceiling to get across, and then blow up the servers to cut the electricity in order to get back across via the lower level. While this is easily the most notable & wild change of all (until the finale, which we'll get to in a bit), there were other moments here & there when I played this on my PS3 right after beating Pure on my Series X where I thought "OK, this is different from before", even if it was only a relatively minor change. For the most part, though, the changes in layout are more subtle, like a hallway diverting you elsewhere so that you enter a room from a different spot, a handful of new hazards to avoid while in some ducts, etc.
As for the storytelling, though, Dark Energy definitely did its best to address the original game's lack of it. Now Mila makes more appearances via video or loudspeaker right in Acts 1 & 2 to espouse the Malthusians' beliefs, Kate & Scoot have new lines where they talk more directly about what the Malthusians are actually doing from a long-term perspective, and there's even a brand new wrinkle at the end of Act 2 where Kate accidentally gets a bunch of Neocell's experimental nanobots into her body, which gives the left side of her body the glow she had during the Challenge Room, i.e. the first signs of her getting hydrokinetic powers; the ends of Acts 1 & 2 are even shifted around slightly to accommodate these new additions to the plot. In fact, Hydrophobia Prophecy has a completely different climax from the original Hydrophobia, now seeing Kate confront Mila face-to-face before fighting a giant drone & passing out after taking a seeming antidote for what the nanobots were doing to her body. The lead up to the new finale even has a brand new section after where the original game stops at, where you get to use Kate's hydrokinetic powers a little, and the powers are essential to fighting the drone boss; that being said, though, the change in ending does result in Billingham never being seen again after Act 1 now. Sure it's still a cliffhanger ending that emphasizes that this was only "Episode 1" of a trilogy, but at least there's an actual "climax" now to the story that is told.
Moving on to the technical aspects of these games, while neither Hydrophobia would have exactly won "Best Visuals" for the years they were released in, both versions still look rather solid, on the whole. Kate's model has enough detail to make her visually memorable, though all of the Malthusian grunts more or less look exactly the same, and the environments you find yourself in are designed well & makes sense, from a structural perspective. Comparing the two takes on the inside of the Queen of the World, while I fully understand why Prophecy changed things up so much visually, I must admit that the changes removed some of the "charm" (for lack of a better word) of the original aesthetic that the original version had. I guess the simplest way to describe it is that Prophecy "gamified" the environment to make it more player friendly, in a sense, while the original game felt a little more "real" & lived in. In terms of performance, both the 360 & PS3 run a relatively solid game throughout, though it does seem as though a cap of 30 fps was coded in to help keep things smooth, with only the occasional moment where performance drops slightly; it's never anywhere near unplayable, though. In comparison, the Xbox Series X just brute forces a locked frame rate for Hydrophobia Pure, while the PC version of Prophecy is... actually, it's a bit weird. You get the obvious options to change the level of detail you want, the resolution, turning v-sync on/off, etc., but no matter what I did I could never get it to run anything about 24 or 25 fps, and I'm using a more recent computer that can play something like Black Mesa at higher frame rates. Even when I turned all of the options to either "Low" or "Off", & disabled v-sync to see if I can bump framerate, it still stuck to the mid-20s at the very start. I'm no expert of PC gaming by any means, but I'm sure there's more to why Hydrophobia Prophecy, which is literally over 12 years old now, is giving my modern PC difficulty at playing at higher framerates that I just can't explain, but I wouldn't be shocked if the Hydro Engine was designed around 30 fps, to start with; forcing the framerate to be higher could potentially ruin how the water works.
As for the musical score by the trio of Yves Altana, Bjørn Arild Lynne (Worms 1 through Open Warfare), & Joseph Shorrocks, it does its job by enforcing an unsure, somewhat claustrophobic feel for the most part, and has an element of dynamism by changing over to a more frantic sound whenever you're in a gunfight or Malthusians know that you're around & are looking for you; it's not a score that you'd listen to in isolation, but it's a very solid one. In regards to the voice cast, it's actually a surprisingly good one when you consider the fact that it's filled with actors who have either never worked on another video game (they were more than likely local stage actors, if I had to guess) or were simply staff at Dark Energy and/or Blade. Lisa Heanley does a very solid job as Kate, sounding very natural in the role & maker her very easily to feel for, when needed. After Kate the only other "major" role would be Scoot, and obviously we have the two actors to address. For "vanilla"/Pure we get Naithan Ariane, who I truly feel did get screwed over & was judged much too harshly to get replaced. Yes, his accent is heavy, but it was never to the point of being unable to understand what he was saying, though I will admit that I had the subtitles on while playing; even without them, though, I would have still understood what Ariane was saying just fine. Not just that, but his performance was great, with his accent only helping give Scoot more personality, in turn making him someone I was always happy to hear as Kate's "radio buddy". As for Prophecy we get Oliver Vaquer (Robert Lutece in Bioshock Infinite, George Baton in Death Stranding), a much more standard (i.e. regularly used) voice actor whose performance is very good & still fits the game just fine, but when compared to Ariane just sounds so... "stock"; Dark Energy shouldn't have caved to the complaints, in this case. As for the rest we have Darrel Webster as Billingham & Elizabeth Dunn as Mila, who both are just fine with what little we're given; in fact, Dunn seemed to relish the extra scenes she was given in Prophecy with her performance, which certainly helps.
In all honesty, I wasn't really expecting this review to be as long as it wound up being, but I think that just shows how interesting of a title Hydrophobia is, when you consider every aspect of it. On the surface it's merely a short little experience that very obviously feels like it wasn't fully finished, but when you look further into its history you find a bit of an ambitious project based around an interesting water simulation engine that, despite being only "Episode 1" of an unrealized trilogy, still has way more to it than you'd expect. Depending on the hardware you play it on you get a somewhat different experience, even though the overall game remains the same, and while Hydrophobia Prophecy seems like it should be the better version by default for a variety of reasons, for some reason I also feel as though Prophecy almost loses something in the transition to PS3 & PC, and I don't just mean Naithan Ariane as Scoot. Sure, changing Scoot's voice actor certainly annoyed me (though that's no fault of Oliver Vaquer's), but I almost feel as though the other various changes made for Prophecy kind of homogenizes what the original intentions were for Hydrophobia.
Yes, the plot is made more obvious & direct in the later version, but thinking about it I feel as though the intention for this first game was to make it be all about Kate & Scoot, first & foremost, with the driving factors of the plot purposefully meant to play out in the background (i.e. the documents), while the later two episodes would have then made that side things play more & more importance as the entire thing went on; in essence, Kate is seriously just a bystander who found herself needing to survive a situation out of her control. By making the driving factors a bit more obvious & focused on in Prophecy, Kate now feels more like a standard reluctant protagonist, especially once she gets infected by the nanobots & getting hydrokinetic powers; in comparison, the original version never even hints at her getting those powers yet. Of course, this is all mere speculation, because it's obvious that Hydrophobia will never see a proper continuation/finish to it. While Cherry Pop Games does own the rights to it they obviously have no intention of making a new entry & are instead content with simply keeping it available for people to purchase & play on both Xbox & PC (& even PS3, until Sony delisted it), and as seen in the fact that other people were still playing it on PS3 recently (yeah, it was only four people, but I expected none) it's not totally forgotten. In a modern gaming landscape where digital-only games getting delisted, & becoming impossible to get a hold of legally, becomes more & more normalized just the simple fact that Hydrophobia is not one of those games is perfectly fine.
*Hydrophobia Pure images from Gaming Nexus, Hydrophobia Prophecy images from Steam*
Hydrophobia (Pure) © 2010 Cherry Pop Games
Hydrophobia Prophecy © 2011 Cherry Pop Games
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