Walking back to the computer with a glass of water in my hand, I put the water down on the table and sat down on the chair in front of it. I boot up the computer, and then Roblox, repeating a ritual I’ve been doing at least once every week…
Yet as I scroll down to the ‘Continue’ section, a game in the ‘Recommended for you’ tab catches my eye. ‘Arcane; Abyss Sea’.
Bear with me for the next bit, here; I wasn’t on the forums until recently, and didn’t know about the Abyss Sea AU as a result.
I click on it. The description leaves me with the impression that this is some kind of clickbaity knockoff of Arcane Odyssey with a horror-themed reskin, but the title cards are surprisingly high-quality. I reread the description, and find myself thinking, Hey, I’m already at the level cap, and who knows when the next update will come out? Might as well try this out for the funsies.
I click the green rectangle, and Roblox boots up.
The title screen opens, dropping down from above in obvious imitation of the game it’s based on. The buttons are pretty much the only thing that hasn’t changed. The sky is filled with dark purple clouds, violet rain pours down, and multicolored lightning fills the sky. The terrain has changed to, now stripped of greenery and decorated with the wreckage of shattered ships.
For something that’s supposed to be a plagurized knock-off, this is bizarrely polished and unjanky.
When I click the purple ‘start’ button, I’m greeted to yet another surprise. The savefile from Arcane Odyssey were ported over. By the looks of it, the classes are even right, though the files say nothing about Galleons or Level and the character models don’t show any equipment. I click my Light Mage, Alyssa Silver, noting the absence of the ‘Teleport to a friend’ option before I hit ‘Continue’.
Again, the button (in this case, “WAKE UP”) was familiar, but the otherwise completely black screen was not.
As I mash said button the way any newbie player in Arcane Odyssey does, the sheet of black on the screen irises open and retreats off the edges of the screen, and I’m greeted to a first-person view of a set of planks as they slowly tilt backward, my character standing up.
…last time I checked, the player started on an island, not a wrecked ship on said island. At least, they did in Arcane Odyssey. It’s quickly becoming clear that whatever troll made this put an unusual amount of effort into it.
The ship is a Brig, the hull dark and visibly damaged as violet rain pours down from above: it looks like the wrecked ships that I sometimes find in the Border area of the Dark Sea. Similar wrecked ships litter the edges of the stony island, and I once again find myself wondering if I missed something.
As the game walks me through the usual WASD/jump/shoot balls of magical death from your fingers tutorial, I note how polished and sleek the animations look. There’s still magic, still the usual balls of light that fly when I click while ‘holding’ Light Magic in my Hotbar, and the HUD looks sorta similar… but the tone, atmosphere, and animations remind me a lot more of ‘Doors’ than they do of Arcane Odyssey…
I’m stirred from my thoughts by a watery gurgle, and my character comes to a stop in front of the door to the wrecked Brig’s Captain’s Quarters. The doorway beyond is shrouded in jet-black darkness, too thick to see through. Pretty unusual for something that’s supposed to be a horror-flavored knockoff of Arcane Odyssey…
Long, purple fingers curl around the doorframe. A moment later, and a fishlike head emerges from the darkness, baring its toothy, shockingly-well-modeled mouth as a monstrous shriek floods my headphones.
It’s only after the jumpscare has run its course, after I’ve regained my bearings, and after I’ve managed through frantic clicking and more than a little in-game scrambling and flailing to avert my character’s death at the hands of her very first encounter with a Mutated Atlantean by the skin of my teeth, that it dawns on me that no, this isn’t some amateurish troll copying and pasting Arcane Odyssey into another world and changing up the colors.
Author’s Note: This is basically Behind the Fourth Wall but taken a little more seriously. I imagine that Abyss Sea wouldn’t be an event in the original Arcane Odyssey game, but an entirely separate game with radically different gameplay and mechanics, reflecting its nature as an AU.