Recent reviews by Define Brackish Water

This is a good game and it's a shame that it's not on Steam anymore. I enjoyed playing through it and the story compelled me to finish it. The part after the first major boss was the hook that sealed the deal. It is written well. I'd give it an ESRB age rating of E10+.

Tetracosm leans into the hard side of things. There are a few advanced movement tricks you can do to get around faster that aren't taught nor needed. The start of the game is difficult with low health and weak attacks and there are a few difficulty spikes along the way. Some of the optional side challenges require some serious skill to get the reward and their achievement. There isn't an easy mode to help inexperienced players get through but the power curve and health pickups smooth things over. Don't walk past a save point without saving and you should be fine.

The game is well polished. The few bugs I found during my entire playtime were minor. I had no stuttering running the game in Fullscreen Windowed with Vsync and the highest "subpixel quality", even after afking on a specific ship for 10 hours to slowly spawn 600+ boxes that jostled around in the water.

The game works well with both keyboard and controllers. I had no issue with either but preferred using a controller. Walking is binary but swimming is analogue. There are a six HUD options to make the buttons match your controller or keyboard. You can remap the controls easily. In addition to challenges around the world you can attempt to find and complete after finishing the game, there's also a boss rush, hard mode, and mirror mode. The game keeps track of its achievements inside of the game.

Like a good book. The kind that you wish was a series yet was thoroughly great solo.

The game is generally slow paced with combat relying on careful strategy. The more HP upgrades you get the more careless you can be. Lots of optional short talks with people and puzzles further space out the combat. I never had to look up a guide to figure out a puzzle but the ones that did stump me for a day were optional. A lot of thought and planning has gone into the story told not only through dialogue but also the environments and context.

This is a good short game. It’s well-polished, has good voice acting, uses its unique features well, and respects the players time. It's evident that the developers put a lot of thought into making the game play smoothly.

The few problems I encountered were inconsequential. I played through the game fine with keyboard controls. The game supports analogue movement with a controller but I had to disable the Steam Input middleman software in the properties section to make it work. I played on 1080p 60 fps and experienced very rare and brief stutters. The game also supports an unlocked framerate and a 30 fps lock as well as 1440p and 2160p resolutions. You can independently control the volume of the SFX, music, and dialogue too though I never touched these.