Mark of the Deep Channels Hades and Hollow Knight For A Satisfying Pirate Adventure
A fishy new Metroidvania is worth your time.
The wait for the launches of Hades 2 and Hollow Knight: Silksong can lead you to some unexpected places in an attempt to fill their shoes. I, for one, never expected a pirate-themed isometric RPG to be the game to ease the wait for them, but that’s just what Mark of the Deep does.
At first glance, Mark of the Deep might just look like a nautical version of Hades, thanks to its top-down perspective and a somewhat similar style for its character portraits. But while it does seem to take some inspiration from Supergiant’s excellent action RPG, Mark of the Deep sets itself apart. For one thing, it’s not a roguelike. Instead, its structure is much more similar to Dark Souls and Hollow Knight, giving you a huge, seamless world to explore and sending you back to checkpoints on defeat. Its combat is also far more in line with Soulslike games, demanding careful timing and strategy rather than tossing yourself headfirst into the fray.
Mark of the Deep’s combat is a satisfying mashup of Hades and Dark Souls.
Despite that soup of references, Mark of the Deep knows exactly what it should and shouldn’t take from its inspirations, rather than just becoming a scattered homage. While falling in battle means returning to a checkpoint and having enemies respawn, Mark of the Deep does away with the punitive notion of losing currency on defeat. Its battle system might be inspired by the precision of Dark Souls, but it’s also stuffed with swarms of squishy enemies that can be dispatched in one or two hits to keep the action moving. From Hollow Knight, it borrows the charm system, which lets you choose from a huge array of upgrades and swap them out at save points.
At the outset of Mark of the Deep, you find yourself shipwrecked on a mysterious island afflicted with a curse that turns its inhabitants into fish people and undead monsters. Your goal is to find the surviving members of your crew, figure out the mystery of how you ended up here, and hopefully escape before you start developing gills and a taste for algae.
Stay too long on Mark of the Deep’s cursed island and you’ll become a scaly fish person, too.
To do all that, you’ll spend most of your time in Mark of the Deep smacking around skeletons and fish folk with a giant hook and a pistol. Combat can be incredibly challenging even from the very beginning, as Mark of the Deep isn’t afraid to fill the screen with difficult enemies using a variety of different attacks. Some launch projectiles from afar, others dive-bomb your character for massive damage, and still others swing their own massive weapons while hiding behind shields. When facing more challenging enemies, you can easily fall in just a few hits, so avoiding damage is just as important as dishing it out. The result can be overwhelming, and the dodge does occasionally feel unreliable, leaving you trapped as enemies whale on you, but overall, it feels great. Boss battles ramp up the difficulty even further, some blending bullet hell-style attacks into their repertoire.
In Metroidvania fashion, finding your way around the island is just as important — and just as challenging — as combat. Mark of the Deep is full of hidden passages and blocked pathways to find with a combination of your character’s skills and your own ingenuity. The game’s overhead perspective is often used to conceal secrets, and poking around the edges of rooms for hidden entrances can lead to some unexpected discoveries.
Exploring the island is just as fun as vanquishing its hostile inhabitants.
Combat abilities also play a part in exploration. Early on, you gain the ability to launch a grappling hook at enemies, then pull yourself toward them for an area attack. It’s an effective way of dealing with nimble foes, but also essential to launch yourself over chasms to reach new parts of the island.
It can be easy to write off games that take clear inspiration from other hits as “clones,” but Mark of the Deep shows that combining those influences in unique ways is an artform of its own. If you’re a fan of Soulslike games and Metroidvanias, you’ve probably seen most elements of Mark of the Deep before, but it manages to find its own identity while still giving fans of those subgenres what they want.
