Thalassophobia is a complicated word for a simple fear. If you struggle to look over the side of a ferry on a lake crossing, disturbed by the roiling waves below, or if the skin across your back prickles at the thought of a diver in water so deep they can't see the seabed or surface above, or if you shudder at the idea of floating in the sea miles from land, kicking your legs with no idea what is swimming in the black depths beneath you…you may well be a thalassophobe. Put simply, it’s the fear of deep bodies of water.

Many developers tap into this particular slant on the fear of the unknown. Some do so directly, by setting their games on the surface of a dark and dangerous sea—or by putting you at the bottom of its unknowable depths. Others slip the scares in sideways, surprising you with their aquatic aberrations.

Below, we’ve rounded up some picks from the Epic Games Store that thalassophobes can really sink into and scare themselves silly.
 

Subnautica: Below Zero

Subnautica: Below Zero drops you on an alien world where the surface is whipped by storms that will freeze you to the bone. It’s much safer—environmentally speaking—to slip into the ocean where the waters keep to a more manageable temperature. There, you can seek out resources to build an underwater home from which to explore the ocean’s floor.

For a game where you spend most of your time underwater, it’s surprising how little of Subnautica prickles thalassophobes. Most of the ocean’s floor is well-lit, with luminous flora and fauna providing warm light almost everywhere you look.

There are two parts of the game, however, that leave my skin crawling. To advance Subnautica’s story, you must go down, down, and down deeper still, into the caverns and chasms that scar the seabed. They’re so deep you don’t have enough air to reach the bottom. Instead, you must refill your scuba tank from rare oxygen-generating plants.

So long as you can find the plants, you can stay in the depths as long as necessary. It’s easy to get lost in the narrow, twisting offshoots of the caves and become trapped though, frantically looking for a plant or even a glimpse of the surface to head towards. Every time you enter a cave, you know you are embracing this breathless possibility.

If you do escape the caves, you face Subnautica's second threat. As you progress the story, the ocean becomes populated with larger, more vicious sea creatures. Giant, sharp-toothed monsters loop through the ocean near the surface. As you swim up for air, you can spot the telltale black silhouette of something that would very much like to eat you.
 

SOMA

It’s unsurprising that SOMA—a game where you’re trapped in an underwater research base being preyed upon by homicidal robots—is scary. I don’t know if I’d want to meet the person who enjoys being stalked through tight, rusting hallways while a machine chases after them, screaming in a human voice.

But it's easy to forget that you’re under the water at all, as there are few windows in the base. It could just as easily be an abandoned mine or a space station—any number of industrial locales favored by makers of horror games.

The oppressive fear of thalassophobia seeps in during those moments when the ocean makes itself known, though. When you open a door to a corridor with a glass ceiling after so much time in the metallic dark, it doesn’t feel like an escape—it's a reminder of how isolated you are. Not only must you escape the monsters that hunt you, but also find a way out of the ocean that surrounds you in cold darkness.

Then there are the times you have to step out of the facility and go for a deep sea walk. Wreathed in thick seawater, the only light comes from the occasional lamp and the red eyes of the robots that patrol the seabed. It's enough to make you want to wear a life preserver while playing.
 

ABZÛ

From the art director of the gorgeous pilgrimage ‘em up Journey, ABZÛ is luscious to behold. As you navigate the oceans in this undersea diving adventure, you meet waters teeming with life. Clouds of fish and pods of dolphins crowd past and circle around as you swim. The sea is awash with color too, with warm golden sands and undersea vines of rich reds and greens. It can sometimes feel like you’re swimming through a painter’s palette.

All this life completely defuses any tinglings of thalassophobia. The ocean feels as though it holds no secrets—which makes it all the more dramatic when that comfort falls away.

There’s a moment early in ABZÛ when you are joined by a robot companion, a yellow drone that follows you, chirruping delightfully in your wake and clearing vegetation from your path. You journey through a small cave together. The drone buzzes ahead, leading you out of the cave and back into the wider ocean—when, out of nowhere, a massive shark snaps it out of the water and swims away, crunching your companion as it disappears into the dark.

A wide expanse of dark water waits ahead, and you notice that for the first time the water isn’t colorful, and the schools of fish that filled your vision are nowhere to be seen. There’s nowhere to hide.

These moments in ABZÛ, so perfectly juxtaposed against the color and joy that pervades most of the game, inject a threat into the world that never leaves you.
 

Outer Wilds

While Outer Wilds is a game about space exploration, not the deep sea, it has one of the most skin-crawling aquatic encounters of any game on this list.

The game is a delightful twist on the Groundhog Day formula—you only have 22 minutes to hop in your spaceship and explore the solar system before the entire thing gets sucked into a black hole. Then the world resets and you start your explorations over.

There is one planet you need to be particularly wary of. Dark Bramble is a strange orb of a planet. Its core is a glowing seed wrapped in thick wooden vines, and its surface is obscured by a dense fog that only thickens the deeper you travel into it.

If you pilot your vessel into the smog, searching for the glowing core, you’ll start to see lights in the cloud. They look like they could be the seed—but fly closer and teeth 20 feet long emerge out of the dark, teeth connected to the jaws of a cavernous mouth belonging to a monstrous astronomical anglerfish.

Time and again you will have to fly into the home of these terrifying fish, risking your ship and vulnerable pilot.

As a thalassophobe, why would you plunge yourself into games designed to squeeze and exploit the primordial fear complex in your brain? Because if you play any of the games above, and if you manage to get through the worst of the encounters, you’ll also feel the flood of relief when you return to the surface. You can pull yourself from the figurative deep end, feel the fresh air in your lungs, and walk away with the relief of someone who escaped the sea's worst.