Imagine Tetris but played in a bottomless ocean shaft, with linked tetronimoes serving to continue your journey down that shaft, providing you keep earning enough points to play them. This is Podvodsk, a free game jam experiment from Loop Hero developers Four Quarters.
Not played Tetris? 1) you bloody liar, and 2) let me frame this differently, then. The idea here is that you’re trying to construct a tapering underwater city out of random clumps of building blocks, dangled from the bottom of a miraculously unsinkable surface platform. Each building both costs points and also, earns points based on different scoring criteria, and every time you play a piece, the screen scrolls irreversibly downward.
Residential blocks score points based on whether they’re close to other types of building. Factory blocks like to be positioned up against the walls of the chasm, so they can mine for ore. Business centres prefer to be a few squares away from other building types – financial analysts do enjoy a bit of elbow room, especially when they’re 300 fathoms under. Seaweed farms want to be close to seaweed, obviously, while scaffolding earns you nothing, but is cheap.
My favourite tiles are bunkers, which can be drilled into the rock, and score points based on the number of other, on-screen bunkers they’re linked to. Getting a vertical streak of bunkers feels like the key to transforming a mere Aquarius Reef Base into a credible Rapture. Science centres, meanwhile, earn points every time the screen scrolls for as long as they’re visible, so you’ll want to park them as far down as possible. And city centres, finally, give you the next three buildings for free.
It might feel like there aren’t enough building types, but the game squeezes some decent intricacy out of these variations, and the pixelart is quite tasty. The real limitation, perhaps, is that too much depends on luck of the draw. As such, Podvodsk is best played in Tactical Mode, which stores any building piece you don’t play for one turn, and thus allows you to strategise a little – placing scaffolding at first to move your seaweed farm closer to a bountiful kelp forest.
The relationships between scoring criteria remind me of wooden token game Seaside, except that Seaside sticks to the shore. If you’re concerned about playing anything from a Russian developer, given the on-going invasion of Ukraine, it’s worth noting that Four Quarters have publicly opposed the war.
