Swallow the Sea is an Action-Adventure game developed by Talia Bob Mair and Nicolás Delgado and published for PC, Mac OS X and Linux.
It is the story of a minuscule embryo called Borrus, traveling through a dark sea full of twisted creatures, trying to feed and survive.
The game can be downloaded for free on itch.io
, and is available on Steam.
This game features examples of:
- Beast with a Human Face: When you complete the third phase and smash open the barrier to progress, you unveil a large pink serpent with a human face, complete with eyes, nose and mouth. Then it's revealed that this face is only the upper half of its head as it opens its real jaws and gives chase.
- Body Horror: And how! Some of the earliest enemies in the game, the Vobbles, have partially exposed skulls that all-but burst out of their head when they give chase. Another enemy is a purple serpent called the Orro, which has a human face, but a large, seemingly bleeding mouth underneath.
- Crapsack World: The game starts as a more-or-less natural life cycle, but the ending reveals that those sea beasts are not the only inhabitants of that world: there is an unknown industrialized civilisation that harvests and slaughters them, dumping prey and predators alike onto a huge conveyor belt to be ground into pulp.
- Downer Ending: Borrus manages to dominate the food chain, only to be put on a conveyor belt and ground into pulp for an industrialized civilization.
- Everything Trying to Kill You: Until you are big enough to hunt them.
- The Hunter Becomes the Hunted: Once you become big enough, former predators become food to you. Yes, even the giant pink serpent which you spend some of the latter half of the game fleeing from.
- Meaningful Name: Orro, the great pink serpent that chases you through most levels, and Borrus, the player character, make up ouroboros. Fittingly, Orro's appearance in the credits shows it devouring its own tail. And in the grander scheme, Borrus's final meal, after a couple levels' worth of being chased by a hungry Orro, is an Orro egg cell.
- Monstrous Cannibalism: Towards the end of the game, you begin consuming other cells that look like Borrus in earlier stages of life. The credits calls them "Siblings" to rub it in. You even get an achievement "Sororicide" for eating all of them.
- Non-Malicious Monster: Which monsters apply? All of them; the monsters we see are not demons but beasts from some other world.
- Womb Level: Parts of the maze of rock tunnels are replaced by red, pulsating flesh and barriers of bone. It is not just for atmosphere, the last part of Borrus's journey is through a living creature.
