Beyond Blue is an underwater exploration game inspired by BBC's Blue Planet 2

The team behind 2014's Never Alone, a puzzle-platformer that doubled as a video documentary about the Alaskan Iñupiaq tribe, have unveiled Beyond Blue, an underwater exploration game inspired by the BBC series Blue Planet 2. It'll be out early next year.

You'll control Mirai, the head of a near-future research team. It'll be a narrative-driven game, but developer E-Line Media, which is making it in collaboration with BBC Studios, says it will also have "high-level resource management". That means it will "challenge the player to make high-stakes decisions and prioritize which objectives can be successfully achieved during the crew’s expedition", according to the game's Steam page.

Like Never Alone, it will also be part-documentary, and feature footage from Blue Planet 2 alongside interviews with experts.

From the look of the trailer, above, it will play a bit like a high-tech Abzu, with a pop-up digital compass and a UV light filter to help you see fish better. Hopefully, like Abzu, you'll be able to just explore if you don't want to pay attention to the objectives.

If it sounds like your bag, then you'll probably find something you like on our list of best underwater games.

Samuel is a freelance journalist and editor who first wrote for PC Gamer nearly a decade ago. Since then he's had stints as a VR specialist, mouse reviewer, and previewer of promising indie games, and is now regularly writing about Fortnite. What he loves most is longer form, interview-led reporting, whether that's Ken Levine on the one phone call that saved his studio, Tim Schafer on a milkman joke that inspired Psychonauts' best level, or historians on what Anno 1800 gets wrong about colonialism. He's based in London.