Titanic II: Orchestra for Dying at Sea
By Drinkrust
From their solo work to collaborative projects as part of BIG BAG, Flan’s directs sober 3D worlds with an acute sense of cinematography, thick atmospheres, and sometimes layers on top of layers of asset flips.
Titanic II: Orchestra for Dying at Sea is a defining work for Flan. Initially released as an exclusive demo for Indiepocalypse #16, it got a full version on June 10th, 2022 and even a Steam release in 2023. The game is described as “an after credits bonus scene for [James Cameron’s] The Titanic.” As such, it begins with movie protagonist Jack falling down into the freezing depths of the North Atlantic, his final moments punctuated by a reprise of Céline Dion’s My Heart Will Go On.
Jack descends not alone, but alongside random paraphernalia and 3D assets like a SpongeBob citizen, a Shiba Inu, a Sonic Chao statuette, and many fish, both dead and alive. He’s going into nitrogen narcosis due to the pressure, which turns his surroundings into dreams and nightmares and back into dreams. A first-time experience with Titanic II benefits greatly from a lowered volume, because right as Dion’s second verse hits, the song will get bass boosted and probably scare the shit out of anyone who’s expecting a more solemn take on Jack’s demise.
At the bottom of the ocean lies the skeleton of renowned digital plumber Mario. It seems that his Evangelion fight in BIG BAG’s Terminal 64 wasn’t kind to him. You wander around as Jack until you get to the Titanic itself, lodged in the sand. Each lower deck room contains a vignette; the most striking is the one with the couple Honey and Darling (from the Nintendo 64 Zeldas) statically hugging under a moonlit void. It was the only room absent from this section in the demo.
Flan directs key scenes with a steady hand. The player doesn’t control Jack or the pacing all the time. The initial fall is mandated to be slow and brooding, and a later scene at a Kingdom Hearts II rendition of a Beauty and the Beast ballroom forces Jack to gaze upon a gracious deity. Even his exploration of the deep sea surroundings gets interrupted after a couple minutes of walking. It makes Titanic II so hypnotizing. From immobile mouselooking around to floating inside the shipwreck to pacing around in a museum at leisure, every moment gets accentuated by a tangible change in feel and player control (or lack thereof).
Not only that, but Flan appropriates the cultural signifiers held by the audio and visuals borrowed from other sources for comedic and dramatic value. It is sometimes hard to take a skinned alive SpongeBob or a faceless Animal Crossing character (also: what is Rover doing as the game’s icon?) seriously, but they are evocative; Jack joins the reign of the pop culture cemetery, lying deep at the recesses of the ocean. His hallucinations are filtered through Flan’s own 3D model choices and thus, this collage knits a bigger picture.
with all my heart, a 2013 game listed in Titanic II’s special thanks section (and a fantastic experience in its own right), echoes this affection for pop culture. It even has My Heart Will Go On as a fixture, too! Both games reverence and satirize their love for Zelda and Céline Dion. The main difference is that with all my heart takes you up to the stars in a romanticized journey, while Titanic II drowns you in the deep, dark sea.
The ballroom scene begins with Jack approaching by floating from outside. It is inside a fish. There, its walls are replaced by glass windows and a view of a distant, idle Rose. His beloved, the last person he saw before the ocean took him, and the object of his sacrifice.
Flashes of player rotatable visions appear before the harsh red lightning dissipates and Jack is free from the worst of his nightmare. He reenters the ballroom from the outside yet again, but is now treated to a cathartic dance performed by the Wind Fish, from The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening. This whale frees Link from his dream in that game, and Jack from his nightmare in this. His presence is sobering. Every ounce of creeping dread from the ocean is gone without a trace, and… an aquarium lies in its place.
This final hit of anachronism treats Jack to a very non-1910s view of the deep ocean, complete with a Twitch.tv screenshot of an ex-professional fisherman talking about his evolving love of jellyfish. There’s a TikTok screencap in there as well. Some of the expository text in the aquarium is still in this odd dingbat font that sporadically appears since the beginning of the game. So.. Jack is still hallucinating.
It’s easy to buy into Titanic II if you were already sold on Titanic’s overwrought drama, but it is an impressive achievement of the game nonetheless. Jack’s languishing alone at the bottom of the sea is filled with desperate cries and terrifying stillness, an attempt at ignoring his death while staring right at it. The inherent comedy of the pop culture sights and sounds only makes it more disconcerting.
Flan uses their games as vessels for any and all ideas they have about something. In this case, the sea. This improvisational current is what gives their games texture; Very few words are said while many images and controls take form. Borrowed Titanic II characters can be understood and talked about as extended versions of their original selves, and vague connections between a deep sea museum, videogame gods, and the protagonist of a 28-year-old film based on a 113-year-old tragedy can be internalized in this barely 30-minute-long videogame. Good job, Flan.