Hydrophobia: Annals of bad encounter design
Spoiler warning: One of the puzzles in Act 2 is explained in excruciating detail here. No story spoilers.
Hydrophobia was maybe a bad choice of game to play right after Dead Space 2, because despite their many differences I can’t help but compare aspects between the two. There’s no way a budget XBLA game made by a relatively small developer is going to be able to compete with a big-budget sequel with the might of EA’s vast resources behind it, but luckily for Hydrophobia, most of its problems are ones of polish—less-than-stellar voice acting, floaty controls, and scenario design that doesn’t do enough to hide the basic game actions (find frequency key, scan area for cipher, unlock encrypted door, repeat). These are exactly the sorts of problems you’d expect from a somewhat unknown developer producing a $15 (now $10) game, and are thus largely forgivable. To a point.
One scenario in the game, however, stands out as the worst scenario I’ve played since the horrific Vietnam hill in Call of Duty: Black Ops—it’s the level where you fight endless waves of enemies unless you figure out one of the two specific ways to get to the next checkpoint. Hydrophobia’s Vietnam occurs in the middle of Act 2, after you’ve turned off half of the ship’s engines. In the large chamber outside the control room, you have to gun down two Malthusians and grab the frequency key off one of their bodies. Shortly afterward, one of the main doors to the chamber bursts open and the room rapidly fills with water. At this point, you get a mission prompt: “Access CCTV and drain the room.”
One of the mechanics in Hydrophobia is the ability to hack into any security camera and use the feed to remotely open doors you couldn’t otherwise reach. Inside the chamber, there are two cameras. As the room floods with water, two more Malthusians drop into the chamber as an additional distraction, so your to-do list shrinks considerably: kill Malthusians, hack camera, find door to open, escape death by drowning. Except when you hack either of the cameras in the chamber, nothing works; there are no unlocked doors in the chamber that either camera can see. All the while, you’re underwater—the water level reaches the ceiling—so you’re spending precious moments searching the murky depths for some hidden trigger before you drown. You’ll never find it, though, because there’s no hidden trigger to find.
Here’s how you’re supposed to drain the chamber: after killing the two enemies (or not, your choice!), you have to float to the surface in the middle of the room, away from the cameras, where you’ll find not only a bubble of air, but also a walkway you can climb onto. From there, you walk to the only unlocked door you can reach, which opens just enough to reveal another camera; hacking into this camera and switching the feeds reveals the same two camera feeds from the chamber, plus a third new feed that shows the door you need to open, plain as day.
It’s the sort of solution that feels like it never got a quality assurance check; surely game testers would’ve figured out very quickly that the two cameras in the chamber were unnecessary red herrings that only caused frustration. In the end, I had to check the internet for a solution. I check the internet often when I’m stuck on an annoying boss fight or puzzle, and sometimes it’s because I’m just stupid (example: the first boss in Crysis). This time, though, I’m pretty sure it’s not me who’s the problem.
[This originally appeared on Wesley’s tumblr.]
