Looking for a whale of a time in this sci-fi visual novel
Developer/ publisher Nathan O Marsh
Format PC
Origin US
Release TBA 2024
(Part One out now)
Wildlife documentaries can be a life-affirming source of wonder. Equally, they can serve as a reality check, a reminder that nature is often as brutal as it is beautiful. It’s a potent, often emotionally overwhelming combination – one which solo developer Nathan Marsh masterfully taps into with his debut game, South Scrimshaw, a visual novel that follows a baby whale and its mother trying to survive in an alien ocean.
It’s speculative fiction told through the format of a documentary, exploring everything from the germination processes of a marine sprout to the lifecycle of an alien ecosystem. With only the first chapter released so far, South Scrimshaw is an ongoing project for Marsh – but from playing the first part alone, the scope of the story he plans to tell is clear.
“I want to present nature as this balance of all these interdependent parts, but it’s also not harmony,” Marsh says. “There’s a tension upholding everything. And the scariness of it, too, is part of that reality. But I want to show it in a way that’s not like Jaws, where there’s a serial-killer animal out there. Everything is part of a balancing force that holds everything up. Everything is leaning on each other.”
If there’s a hint of David Attenborough in those last two sentences, it’s no surprise to discover that BBC documentaries The Private Life Of Plants and The Life Of Birds were major inspirations. But the series that had the biggest influence on South Scrimshaw was Life In The Undergrowth. “The first episode focuses on invertebrates moving onto land from the water,” Marsh explains. “The way [Attenborough] talks about the oceans being where all our ancestors came from is so evocative, and that’s one of the reasons why I decided to do something set in the ocean. It just made it seem more magical.”
Indeed, that so much of our natural world’s history feels alien makes it fertile territory for speculative fiction. South Scrimshaw’s alien ocean is full of strange, organic life – at once familiar yet foreign. Creating a believable and engaging alien ecosystem can’t be easy, but Marsh says he writes it systematically. “For me, it begins with real concepts,” he says. “If there’s one element I like, I exaggerate it, then that makes me consider all these other elements that are required to make it feasible. I feel like the way I write is I tend to mirror Earth very closely and then, as I exaggerate things, it gets more and more whimsical.”
Specifically, the alien ecology of whales is what drives South Scrimshaw’s story. Throughout the four-hour Part One, an emotional connection forms as you learn more about this calf and its mother. It reflects ou
