While Degado is staying tight-lipped on how the supernatural has taken root, she does tease that Call of the Sea will play with expectation, distorting reality for impact when the occasion calls for it. Things are not as they seem on the island.

You aren't going to find jump scares in the game or monsters with tentacles or anything like that… we want you to solve the mystery we have created, slowly realising that there is more to the world than meets the eye.' 'We're not, but we are drawing inspiration from his stories. Lovecraft, people think we are making a horror game,' laughs Delgado. The studio is embracing its fascination with the occult and the supernatural, leveraging the unknown to create a sense of unease on the island as you begin to piece together information on the locale's past and the fate of the missing expedition. After all, Call of the Sea is being touted as an 'otherworldly adventure'. There's no telling what you might uncover beneath the surface. For as inviting as the island may look to an outsider, it won't take long to realise that there's something amiss in paradise. But looks can be deceiving, Delgado warns. Call of the Sea is vivid and vibrant, its island is a space I'd be only too happy to get lost in. It's easy to see the appeal in an experience such as this. you can move forward with a fresh mind to face a new puzzle and a new part of the story.' That's why we prefer to give you an area of the island where you have plenty of room to explore and once that part of the story is closed we move you forward to a different place,' Delgado says, adding, 'We don't want you to think 'I've left this part unexplored and I’m missing something'. 'We also wanted to give the player the feeling that they haven't left anything behind. 'We decided to structure the game… I know sometimes when we say 'linear' it's considered bad, but in this case we needed to close areas of the island off because we wanted to craft the story and detail.' It should come as no surprise, then, to learn that Delgado has previously held positions at Tequila Works (Deadlight, Rime) and Vertical Robot (Red Matter). Out of the Blue has gone to great lengths to create authored spaces enclosed environments dense with detail. That doesn't, however, mean that Call of the Sea is set in an open world. 'We want to tell a story about characters in their 40s – we're not used to seeing characters that have adventures at that age' Tatiana Delgado, game director We want you to feel like a detective, figuring out what happened on the island and what people were doing here.' 'We like to craft environments where you can just explore the details.

There are puzzles related to their technology too – you have to fix a machine, but you'll need to try to understand how the gear mechanisms work before you can try to fix it,' she says. The puzzles are related to an old civilisation that you're going to find – you might need to explore some ruins to try and figure out what a building was used for, for example. 'We’re trying to avoid that feeling of 'Oh, a puzzle. You have to explore to understand the world and learn how it works to solve its puzzles.'

'We wanted the puzzles to be integrated into the world. So whenever there’s a puzzle, you, as a reward, make the story go forward,' Delgado continues, explaining that the team has put much of its focus over the year of development into intertwining these elements as closely as it can. 'We want the narrative to be more important than the puzzles. Instead, the game centres on storytelling by way of solving the central mystery. Call of the Sea is entirely non-violent too, featuring no discernable physical combat.

Call of the sea star puzzle