A game that opens in a beautiful library that exists outside of time, Mythic Ocean tasks you with befriending the gods that will create the next reality. Your influence on them will inform the type of universe they create next when the time comes.

You leave the library and awaken on the bottom of the ocean floor. A helpful fish – the only character with any memory of this world-birthing process – takes you through what you’ll need to do.

The gameplay takes the form of a reactive, intelligent visual novel. You explore the ocean and chat to creatures you come across. Some will just be friendly (or not so friendly) fish, crabs, turtles and other sorts of marine life.

Then there are the six different gods. Your conversations with them drive the plot. Your choices when it comes to how you interact with them influence their behaviour and attitudes during the story. At the end of your run, one of them will take on the responsibility of building the next world. What they’ve learned from their budding friendship with you will shape the universe they create.

There are multiple endings to unlock based on which god is given the task of creation and how your interactions with them went. You might manage to inspire the gods to create a world of perfect peace and harmony or utter chaos.

It’s difficult to tell, especially in your first few attempts, what consequences your choices will have. This sense of intrigue makes it definitely worth replaying to see how things change with your decisions.

While the gameplay is uncomplicated, Mythic Ocean invites you to consider deep philosophical questions. Without feeling at all heavy or overbearing, it raises profound ideas about the influence an individual can have. The tone with which you offer an apparently off-hand comment can have more of an impact on someone else than you might imagine. That impact can then ripple through their future, informing their thoughts and actions in ways that you might never have considered.

The setting of Mythic Ocean is gorgeous. The underwater scenery is beautifully designed, with rich colours and a real sense of life to it. As well as the sort of natural phenomena you find in real ocean depths, you explore fantastic sunken machinery that place everything you experience just outside of reality.

The characters are a lot of fun to chat to. Each one is well written, with familiar ideas woven into unique personalities to create the kind of nuanced, interesting creatures that are genuinely enjoyable to befriend. Even the background characters that don’t have much bearing on the story are good fun, injecting sweet little subplots and bursts of humour into the game.

You can complete a run of Mythic Ocean in just a few hours, but the game offers plenty of motivation to give it go after go to figure out every type of world that your influence could inspire.