YMMV / Drowned God

• Awesome Art: Many of Harry Horse’s own designs and illustrations are shown throughout Drowned God, and they help bring the game’s weird lore to life. The rest of the art direction done in collaboration with Alastair Graham is no slouch, either, with the pre-rendered backgrounds being stuffed to the brim with subtle environmental details that flesh out the story and foreshadow things to come.
• Awesome Music: As much as it can overpower the dialogue and sound repetitive after a while, the music by the group Miasma still perfectly fits the atmosphere of every location, with tracks like Spiral Staircase 1, The Shore, and American Submarine being especially nerve-wracking (though do note a lot of the names are Fanon since there was never an official release for the soundtrack).
• Big-Lipped Alligator Moment:
  • When you return to the guy in the diving suit in the Din subway, he pulls a lever which produces a red mist that covers your vision, leading to an Art Shift of a 2-D/3-D vision of some kind showing yourself going through an alien probing where they tell you to forget what happened. It’s ambiguous if this vision was your character remembering something that occurred in the past, if this was a vision of the future, or if the mist transported you to the probing and then put you right back where you were when it was over. Since you later discover an implant in your head in Chokmah, at some point you were indeed abducted by the aliens.
• Captain Obvious Reveal: It doesn't take a rocket scientist to look at the box art or the marketing to figure out that the "Conspiracy of the Ages" is aliens influencing Earth. To be fair, the developers of the game didn’t bother trying to hide it in interviews, and it could be argued that the game is more about figuring out the why and how, while there are other more sinister conspiracies that need uncovering.
• Ensemble Dark Horse: As much as anyone in this game could possibly be a Darkhorse, Baphomet is liked by many players for his cool design that raises some unnerving questions, his voice acting, and his chilling lines that are as evocative in their imagery as they are mysterious. It helps that he’s an unfortunately rare character whose audio isn’t drowned (no pun intended) by the music.
• Fandom VIP: An online user called Yankee Pendragon AKA The Man in the Grey Suit has followed Drowned God for almost as long as it's been around and had written correspondence with Richard Horne in the mid-2000s. And so, it is from him where much of the information in What Could Have Been was first elaborated, such as some of the cut content in Chokmah and that The Relic Hunter originally had an expanded role.
• Fridge Brilliance:
  • For Baphomet, at first it may seem random that he's depicted as just a head (albeit inside a mechanical one) instead of the famous half goat-half human interpretation that came about in the 19th century, but it's most likely a subtle Shout-Out to the old accusations against the Knights Templar of them worshipping a head for an idol.
  • In a bit of environmental Foreshadowing, the building in Binah which houses the Round Table is a metal torso with a missing right hand and head. What at first appears to be just a weird artistic decision makes more sense when you see the corpse of Osiris who also has a missing right hand and head. This means at least some of the people involved like Merlin and King Arthur were among those who were preserving the true knowledge of history throughout the ages. (Although with how Binah and Chesed originally had their order in the game reversed, the original intention would have been to be a reinforcement of the imagery for the player, but the way it turned out in the final product makes it this.)
• Harsher in Hindsight: A few of the glimpses of the future heard on the radio in Chokmah eerily mirror world events many years after the game's release. Arcadia, the omnipresent MegaCorp that has their fingers in every pie can be compared to the rise of Amazon, and the mention of Bill Gates (who is not a senator at the time of this writing but has become very influential in his own way) getting into a corporate war with Disney almost feels like it's foreshadowing about the monopolies Microsoft and Disney would become in the 21st century, absorbing many other corporations in their growth.
• Overshadowed by Controversy: There is no doubt that the deaths of Richard Horne and his wife Amanda in 2007, which some sources reported as a murder-suicide by Richard, cast a dark shadow on Drowned God: Conspiracy of the Ages and it's probably part of the reason why it's become Abandonware.
• Retroactive Recognition: Peter Serafinowicz is listed as a voice actor in what is an earlier voice role for him. He is most likely the actor who appears in the Electronic Press Kit for the game where he is shown to voice Albert Einstein and some of the in-game radio ads. Since his name is listed second in the end credits, it's likely he voiced other more important characters like perhaps Kether, but it is unknown as of now.
• So Okay, It's Average: The common consensus among critics and players ever since it released. While the game was praised at the time for its strong art direction, creepy atmosphere, and interesting ideas, issues like bugs, horribly inconsistent audio quality, tedious puzzles, as well as how it was clear the game wasn’t able to include all the story elements it wanted to, made it appear as just another Myst clone even though it’s tone and story were anything but.
• That One Puzzle:
  • The board game against the Templar in Binah where you have to douse the last flame on the board in each game to win, and every time you lose you have to drink poison. The rules are explained to you, but the Templar drunkenly slurs pretty much all of his voice lines which makes it very confusing. Luckily, you can reset before you drink a second poison in a row.
  • The 9 Men's Morris game in one of the Chesed temples has a fiendishly aggressive AI opponent, which can often mean winning the game comes down to pure luck.
  • The Rod of Osiris puzzle in the submarine has four dials that you have to use in order to bring the Rod close enough to grab it, with three of the dials controlling the X, Y, and Z axis and one dial controlling the Rod's rotation, and you only have four tries to adjust the Rod's position in a very specific way before you're kicked out and have to try again.
• Unintentional Period Piece: Looking past the Myst-style gameplay, Drowned God is definitely a product of the 90’s fascination with aliens and conspiracy theories alongside shows like The X-Files and movies like Independence Day. References are also made to then-contemporary cults including Aum Shinrikyo and The Order of the Solar Temple. It’s a downplayed example, however, as many of the ideas this game holds still hold weight or became even more popular in the conspiracy theory world later on, and the references to contemporary pop culture and history are minimal.

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