“I like to say that our industry is becoming adult, that we’re growing up. I love being in the games industry at a time like this,” Geppert says. They’re the kind of characters that might have felt unusual in the gaming world a decade ago, but now fit right into a generation of indie games tackling difficult topics with nuance-titles like Omori. All of the creatures in this world are multifaceted, with designs that can shift from frightening to sympathetic. Kay’s brother became an immense bird, desperately trying to fly away from the spectral children taunting him. The magnetic, destructive partner became a white wolf, whose handsome facade conceals the snarling, black dog within. Geppert’s background as a graphic novel illustrator helped bring her monsters to life. Sign up for our Games newsletter and never miss our latest gaming tips, reviews, and features. The monsters became monsters representing loneliness, representing self-doubt.” “All of this heavily influenced my writing on Sea of Solitude. “As I talked to other people about my issues, friends, family, even strangers, started to open up to me,” Geppert says.
Realizing she needed to take care of herself, she started therapy and began reaching out to others in her life. Months of swinging between the emotional highs and lows had led her to neglect her relationships with friends and family.
By the time her partner confessed that he suffered from depression, Geppert was a fraying, nervous wreck. Whenever he resurfaced, he would shower her with affection, she would forgive the unexplained absence, and the cycle would continue. Toward the end, he was disappearing for two weeks at a time. His constant stream of communication would go silent-at first for an hour or two, then for days on end. It wasn’t long though before his behavior began to shift, at first so subtly that Geppert wondered if she was imagining it. Within a few months, they were talking of marriage. In 2014, Geppert fell into a toxic relationship with a man that left her anxious and isolated in a way she had never experienced. One person left an abusive ex-husband and they wrote to us a year later to tell us that they are happily in a new relationship.” “Some people even changed their lives for the better. Parents wrote about how discussing the game around the dinner table had allowed children and teens to open up about their own issues. “Hundreds and hundreds of fans-kids, adults, parents-contacted us and expressed how much it helped them to not feel so alone,” Geppert says. Within months, emails poured in from all over the world. Something about the haunting artwork and the archetypal struggles it represents resonated with players.
The seascape, which oscillates between saturated colors and murky, ominous hues depending on Kay’s mood, feels like a children’s book set in motion. While other games, including A Night in the Woods and Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice, have explored issues surrounding mental health, few have managed to illustrate depression, anxiety, and loneliness in such a mesmerizingly beautiful fashion. Since its initial release, Sea of Solitude has had a far wider impact than Geppert ever anticipated. Though Sea of Solitude’s initial release in 2019 with publisher Electronic Arts Originals predates the pandemic, few works feel as tailor-made to the claustrophobia and alienation of the world we’re now living in. Fittingly, Jo-Mei released Sea of Solitude: The Director’s Cut, a collaboration with French developer Quantic Dream, exclusively for the Nintendo Switch on March 4. Kay’s struggle to stay afloat, literally and figuratively, may feel familiar to many people who have spent an uncomfortable amount of time locked in with their own thoughts over the past year. All of the people in Kay’s life-her brother, who is being bullied at school her parents, embroiled in divorce and her partner, devoured by clinical depression-have degenerated into monsters as well, too trapped in their own cyclical traumas to see a way out. There’s a giant who screeches out the self-loathing monologue in Kay’s head and a serpentine beast that lurks beneath the waves, threatening to capsize her rickety boat. This nightmarish fable from Berlin-based developer Jo-Mei Games takes place inside a young woman’s deteriorating psyche, depicted as a drowned city populated by the manifestations of her inner demons. Consumed by loneliness, she has transformed into a monstrous caricature of herself. Dark fur covers her limbs and her eyes glow like embers. When we first meet Kay, the protagonist of Sea of Solitude, she cannot remember when she last saw the sun and no longer recognizes her own reflection.
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