A small boat, a sack of letters and a quiet masterpiece, by Owen Eze
An original contemporary online review.
Most video games want you to feel powerful. You are a soldier, a wizard, a racing driver, a god. ‘Low Water’, the debut game from a four-person studio in Bristol, wants you to feel something much rarer: useful. You are Fenella, a seventy-year-old postwoman in a coastal town that has been half swallowed by the sea, and your job is to deliver the post. That is all. It is one of the most gripping things I have played in years.
The town of Marrow is beautifully realised. Rooftops poke out of green water like the backs of sleeping whales. Lamp posts lean at drunken angles. Fenella rows between them in a little red boat, her sack of letters wrapped in oilskin, while gulls squabble on chimney pots and the tide, which rises and falls in real time, opens some streets and closes others. Miss the tide and you wait. The game will not hurry you, and after a while you stop wanting it to.
What makes ‘Low Water’ special is the people. Each letter belongs to someone who has chosen to stay in the drowning town, and each delivery opens a small window into a life. There is a retired music teacher who plays the cello from her upstairs window every evening, to nobody. There is a boy waiting for news of a father working on the rigs. There is a man who writes to himself, every week, because he likes to receive post. You never solve their problems. You simply turn up, and that turns out to be enough.
The writing is restrained and often very funny. Fenella is sharp-tongued and refuses to be pitied; when a neighbour asks why she does not move inland like everyone else, she replies, ‘Because then who would you complain to?’ But the game also knows exactly when to fall silent. One letter, which I will not spoil, is delivered to a house whose door no longer opens. Fenella simply leaves it on the windowsill and rows away, and the music stops. I put my controller down for some time after that.
It is not perfect. The rowing controls are fiddly at first, and the hand-drawn map can be maddeningly vague. Players who need explosions, or even a clear goal, may find it slow. A full playthrough lasts only around six hours.
But those six hours stay with you. In an industry obsessed with bigger worlds and louder battles, ‘Low Water’ is brave enough to be small. It is a game about rising seas and empty houses, yes, but it is also about the dignity of turning up for people. When the final letter was delivered and Fenella rowed out towards the horizon, I realised I did not want to stop rowing.
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