A few weeks ago, Windows 10's lock screen suddenly served up an image of unearthly beauty: a luminous alien mushroom vehicle of some kind, delicate and almost translucent, perched on the end of a midnight jetty. It turned out to be the diving gondola at the end of Selin Pier in Germany, and I was so captured by the idea of the thing, the way in which its fantastical form enabled its fantastical function, that it was hard not to dream about a quick trip through the waves in it. Slope downwards to thy depths, O sea! There is a peculiar imaginative tug to the strange life that awaits at the bottom of the ocean. There is a horrible romance and adventure to the things that scuttle over the dark sands down there, things born without jaws, without eyes. This may explain why a game as traditional as Song of the Deep had, at times, a gentle hold on me that its individual elements do not quite justify. At times.
Not that tradition is ever a major mark against you in a metroidvania, the action-adventure genre built of back-tracking and gear-gating, puzzles and boss battles, that plays out across a single complex environment. The template is strong to start with here, and it's only reinforced with every new example. Song of the Deep is not a bad metroidvania by any metric. Its storyline is suitably sweet-natured, as a young girl leaps into a submarine to search the oceans for the missing father who has told her so many wild tales of his life as a fisherman. Its 2D visuals are pretty enough, as your golden craft chugs through the swaying depths, its passage triggering bioluminescent fronds on nearby plants, while the scenery changes from shipwreck graveyard to submerged city, shattered finials replacing rusting figureheads. The weapons and gadgets you're given are suitably potent, most notably the grappling hook that allows you to pick up and throw rocks and shells, but which also doubles more directly as a ranged weapon with a nice thud to it. And the enemies were never going to disappoint: electrical jellies swarming and multiplying, armoured crabs with hidden weak spots, splay-toothed anglerfish - a fish so monstrously unlovable that it looks like it came from D&D's Monster Manual in the first place. (It isn't in there, I've checked.)
And yet, Song of the Deep pays a price for this warm embrace of genre. This isn't a bad metroidvania, but it is also far from being one of the best, and if you've played any recent metroidvanias, let alone an undersea offering like Aquaria, you're not going to see much that you did not expect in here. And yes, some of this is because the genre demands it. There's the progression by means of different doors and keys, of course: jellyfish who block vital gaps and only flee once you have headlamps to chase them, stone walls that crumble beneath a rocket impact, fire barriers, ice barriers, glass barriers, all of which have their counter in your steadily improving arsenal. There are the upgrades, which allow you to boost a little further against the strong tide, to turn a missile into a shield or a mine, or to alter the health drop-rate of defeated foes. All of these things are fine and most of them are entirely necessary - but none of them are handled in a particularly exciting manner, and the best metroidvanias make their familiar components exciting with inventive twists.
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