Open Waters takes away the map and makes you navigate
3 min read
Take the minimap out of most open worlds and they stop working. Open Waters is built for the absence: a compass, a sonar, and whatever you can work out from a sound.
Navigation as the actual game
You are stranded in a small boat on an ocean that is vast and full of terrors. The job is to navigate treacherous waters, evade the creatures below, and find your way back to safety before the ocean drags you under. The tools are a compass and a handheld sonar device.
With minimal maps and waypoints, you chart your own path from whatever information you can find: a note, a direction, a sound, or a star. That is a genuinely different activity to following a marker, and it is one that most survival games gesture at and then quietly undo in a patch.
The ocean is also the right surface for it. There are no landmarks by default, so every fixed point you establish is one you earned. Abandoned sites are scattered across it, and they may hold the clues you need to get out.
Why the missing HUD is the design
Why you probably didn’t get lost in Metroid Dread is the counterweight worth reading first. Dread guides you constantly without a quest marker, using shape, light and door placement, because a designer decided where you should look. An open ocean has none of those affordances by default and has to build them.
The power of video game HUDs is the other half. A HUD is not decoration, it is a contract about what the player is allowed to know. Removing it does not automatically create tension; it creates confusion unless something else carries the information.
Sound is the obvious candidate and the store copy names it. If a direction can be heard, the ocean has a HUD after all — it is just one you have to listen to rather than glance at.
What you actually get
Open Waters is by FluffyGameDev, self-published, listed as To be announced on Windows, under Action and Adventure. The pillars are exploring the uncharted, discovering haunted locations, and not falling into the water.
Thalassophobia is doing a lot of the emotional work and it is a reliable engine — deep water is frightening without any monster design at all. The design question is whether the fear survives competence. Once you can navigate, does the ocean still feel large? Survival horror usually answers that by taking something away again, and a boat has plenty that can be taken.
If the appeal is a hostile environment that rearranges itself while you work, Funnel Runners is the other one on this list — an F5 tornado tearing the map apart building by building while you collect data inside it.
