S.O.N.A.R. gives four people nine stations and no way to watch them all

It is a one to four player online co-op submarine simulator, and the number that decides everything is nine. Navigation, diving, sonar, periscope, engineering, damage control and the rest are separate stations on one hull, and a full crew is four people. That arithmetic never resolves. Somebody is always at the wrong end of the boat when the thing that needs doing starts.

The verbs are physical and unglamorous. You steer, you dive, you sweep for contacts, you raise the periscope, you fire, and then you spend the rest of the engagement putting out fires, plugging holes and recalibrating systems that have shaken themselves out of tune. The missions are hunts for hostile vessels, escort work for cargo ships, treasure recovery on the ocean floor, and infiltrations past enemy destroyers where the entire objective is not being heard.

A submarine is unusual co-op material because it takes sight away. The submarine is not a vehicle so much as nine jobs bolted to a hull. Nobody aboard can look out of a window and see what is wrong, so every crew member is reading one instrument that describes one slice of a situation none of you can see whole. The picture only exists out loud, assembled from four people describing their own dial.

That is what proximity voice chat is for here, and why the developers list shouting orders, warning everyone about imminent disaster, and explaining whose fault the catastrophe definitely is as three separate features. There is even a slap, for the crewmate who starts reading the manual during a torpedo attack. Around all of it sits the lighter stuff — uniforms, hats, gear you unlock as you level, and a victory dance you can perform while the boat fills with water.

How Overcooked’s kitchens force you to communicate argues that most co-op manufactures teamwork by handing players different powers or different information, while Overcooked hands everyone the same tools and lets the cramped, burning kitchen create the talking. S.O.N.A.R. takes the split-role route the essay is sceptical of, and the hull is what saves it: nine stations would just be nine solo minigames if the flooding, the fire and the sinking were not shared by all four of you at once.

The power of video game HUDs makes the case that a HUD is not decoration but a design tool, deciding what players notice, how confidently they act, and which mechanics a game can carry at all. In a submarine that goes further than usual, because the instruments are not a layer over the world — they are the only world anyone gets. Whether a sonar sweep reads as information or as noise is the difference between a crew that coordinates and one that guesses.

How stealth game guards see and hear is about simulated sight and hearing, and how much of that machinery you expose to the player decides whether stealth feels tense or tactical. The infiltration missions invert the usual arrangement: you are the thing being listened for, by destroyers running their own sweeps, and the sub is loud in ways your crewmates control. A stealth run is only fair if everyone can tell which of the nine stations is making the noise.

S.O.N.A.R. - Submarine Operators Not Actually Ready is developed by Abylight Barcelona and published by Abylight Studios. It is listed as coming soon on Windows, with no announced date, under Casual, Indie and Simulation. There is single-player alongside the one to four player online co-op, plus online PvP, Steam achievements and full controller support.

The title is doing honest work. A game called Submarine Operators Not Actually Ready is telling you that incompetence is the content and that the systems are built to survive it, which is a more useful promise than a simulator claiming realism it cannot hold up in a four-player session.

If the appeal is a crewed vehicle carved into stations nobody can cover alone, Dear Passengers is the closest thing on this list — it splits a plane into a cockpit and a cabin, puts them in different hands, and makes the gap between the two the actual game.