Most gamers are familiar with exploring apocalyptic wastelands or magical forests, but The Great Ocean offers completely new experience. In The Great Ocean, players can plumb the cold and dark depths of the sea, and today Actrio Studio has announced that the game will soon be available for PC VR in celebration of Earth Day 2023. The game was released last year on Oculus Quest 2, The Great Ocean for PC VR “will be bigger, better, include more content, have more options, and is tailored specifically to the platform.”
The Great Ocean throws players into the deep end by assigning them exploratory missions, solving quests in sunken battleships and coral reefs. One objective of the game is ocean conservation, a task players can complete while swimming with whales, sharks, and sea turtles. Every mission in the game is based on real ocean settings and sea creatures. First released on World Cleanup Day 2022, The Great Ocean is an explicitly environmentalist game that teaches players the practical realities of protecting the ocean:
You will also encounter the giants and living wonders of the oceans and learn more about this unique, beautiful, and threatened world – and you can check it out in detail in the laboratory. Your missions let you take action to help the underwater world by freeing or healing fish, building new coral reefs, removing trash, and gathering evidence for crimes against the Ocean Health. With each completed mission you contribute to protect and save the oceans. Featuring hours of gameplay with a personal story, great interaction, and challenging quests with a global leaderboard, you are challenged to explore the oceans and to go where no person has gone before. -The Great Ocean press release
One unique feature of The Great Ocean is the real-life impacts its players can make in supporting the organizations that collaborated with Actrio Studio to design the game. One organization is rrreefs, group of “women who use science, art and education who are rethinking, rebuilding and regenerating coral reefs with an award-winning modular system of 3D-printed rrreef bricks, made with pure clay.” Actrio also names Mare Nostrum, a nonprofit “with a mandate to create practical and lasting solutions for the protection of our oceans, focusing on Marine Pollution, Overfishing, and Climate Change. Their research on using new tech to reduce bycatch of sea turtles is groundbreaking.”
Fans can check out The Great Ocean’s page on Steam, and they can also check the upcoming game’s Kickstarter link to be notified of its release.