- "My life-long work has been to find the origin point of man's fall from grace. It has taken me all over the world, but I believe I am closer than ever to finding the truth."
Water Womb World is a shortnote art-horror PC game released in 2020 by Yames, the creator of Discover My Body. The game follows the unnamed protagonist, a Catholic researcher exploring the ocean floor in search of evidence of the place where humanity fell from grace. He hopes to find proof of what he believes to be the truth of humanity's origin: that mankind did not originate on land in the Garden of Eden, but within the darkest reaches of the sea.
Water Womb World can be purchased under a pay-what-you-want scheme on Yames's itch.io site here
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Due to the short length of the game, spoilers have been left unmarked.
Water Womb World provides examples of:
- Alliterative Title: Water Womb World.
- Angelic Abomination: The "angel" the protagonist encounters outside his ship after his lights go out the first time looks like something between a robed bishop and a giant squid and cryptically warns him that he will leave as a human or he will "join God in full-flesh" in the womb of origin.
- Angels, Devils and Squid: The "angel" that the protagonist meets looks like some combination of a bishop and a giant squid, while the entities that the protagonist believes to be the sinless descendents of Adam and Eve look more like colossal pillars of red "coral" than anything human.
- Benevolent Abomination: Despite the eerie mood of the story, the supernatural elements are not malevolent in anyway at all; the effects they have on the protagonist are simply a natural result of his presence near them and the location he nears. The angel even explicitly warns him about precisely what will happen if he persists, and the process itself doesn't seem to be an inherently bad thing, just trading one kind of life for another. God Is Good even when God is a terrifying aquatic Eldritch Abomination.
- Central Theme: Returning to the womb.
- Character Portrait: One of the red entities the protagonist meets after the lights in his submersible go out the second time has a portrait when it speaks.
- The Conspiracy: After finding an abandoned dive mask marked with Christian imagery, the protagonist states that there are forces within the Catholic church aware of the truth of humanity's aquatic origins, conspiring to prevent the public from learning about the "aqua-Edenic theory" and possibly eliminating other researchers seeking evidence of it.
- Corrupt Church: The protagonist implies the Catholic church to be corrupt, mentioning that there are inside forces within the Vatican acting to suppress the aquatic origin of humanity and any researchers studying it.
- Cosmic Horror Story: The game incorporates elements of cosmic horror along with Catholic theology as the protagonist discovers cryptic evidence for the aquatic origins of humanity at the bottom of the sea. The protagonist believes everything they find to be real evidence of the divine up until the end, when they choose to become one of the colossal red entities that they identified as being the sinless human descendants of Adam and Eve.
- Eldritch Abomination: God is revealed to be a Hive Mind of sentient red pillars of coral fused together, with the resulting towering entity sporting a single glowing eye.
- Eldritch Ocean Abyss: Outside his encampment at the bottom of the sea, the protagonist finds impossibly old and at times indescribable fish, pieces of coral containing human neurons, and massive, bizarre "angels" and "people" who speak in cryptic sentence fragments.
- Fantastic Catholicism: The story essentially presents the idea of the Garden of Eden not being an earthly or even heavenly paradise, but rather located below the ocean as the "womb" in which life was first born during the creation of Earth, as a reflection of life originating in water and the necessity of it for life to persist. With it comes the implication that Adam and Eve were, in fact, the first aquatic creatures to climb out of the water and live on land after eating of the Fruit of Knowledge. The protagonist's search brings him to the Garden, and in doing so, causes him to rejoin with God and return to the ancient way of life beneath the sea. The Vatican knows about all this, but seeks to suppress knowledge of it.
- God Is Good: He's as scary and eldritch as can be and merely being within His presence causes you to devolve into an earlier sinless form of life, but He's still the all-loving creator and expressly warns any humans who come near what it entails. While terrifying to behold, there's no indication He's anything less than totally benevolent to His children.
- Hive Mind: A possible interpretation of the game's portrayal of God; that "He's" the Eldritch Abomination from which life came by splitting off Him to have individuality, and dying or going to the Garden means rejoining with the hive mind.
- Long-Lived: The forms of life that apparently exist around the aquatic place of origin seem to live exceptionally long lives. One of the Adamite sons is estimated to have lived for a millennium, while an ancient fish the protagonist catches is figured to be about 10,000 years old. Another fish dates back to the Jurassic period.
- Maybe Magic, Maybe Mundane: The protagonist returns to the Garden of Eden and joins with our perfect ancestors... or discovers a psychic Hive Mind and falls prey to it.
- Mind Screw: There is very little clear exposition, lots of strange events, and a great deal of possible interpretations of the game's themes and plot.
- No Name Given: The protagonist and player character never has a name mentioned, nor do any of the entities he encounters.
- Nothing Is Scarier: The lights outside the protagonist's submersible go out after he hears the song of an impossibly large whale, leaving him to rummage for evidence in pitch darkness.
- Rule of Symbolism: The fish in the Garden can't tell the difference between light and dark, similar to Adam and Eve lacking knowledge of good and evil prior to eating the Fruit of Knowledge.
- Scrolling Text: The protagonist's text speed eventually slows to a crawl as they become increasingly lethargic and assimilated into the "divine" towards the end of the game.
- Shout-Out: The protagonist mentions the "angel" he sees as matching the description found in the "New Genesis Apocrypha", a loose translation of "Neon Genesis Evangelion".
- Time Abyss: The protagonist at one point finds a fish that's apparently been alive since the Jurassic Period, making it hundreds of millions of years old. The next fish he finds similarly precedes multiple geologic periods.
- Title Drop: The red "people" state "WATER WOMB WORLD" when the protagonist meets them for the first time, then again when he swims back out to join them at the end of the game.
- Transformation Horror: It's subtle, but checking the protagonist's appearance in the mirror over the course of the game reveals his eyes becoming darker. His gloves are also replaced by scaled claws in the final sifting segment, reflecting his growing assimilation with whatever supernatural force he's been making contact with.
