What Surrounds Us takes its title literally. You play as a circle surrounding a hole in its middle — it looks like a donut with frosting. You work together with other sentient moving circles, sometimes helping them joyfully meet with others. And you traverse a large map that’s composed entirely of, you guessed it, a series of circles. But the circles everywhere aren’t just an artistic choice; they underscore the game’s themes about working in connection with the environment and the things around us.
Despite the trippy design, What Surrounds Us has a familiar format. I kept feeling echoes of The Legend of Zelda as I trekked across three distinct regions and solved lightweight puzzles to get from place to place. Over the course of the game you’ll get new powers, like the ability to traverse gaps by charging up a big leap. Later on, you’ll have to find ways to get around a glitchy substance that frequently snakes around the world and blocks your path.
The Zelda inspiration helped me settle into a game that offers little in the way of instructions. There’s basically no text and only a few onscreen prompts to explain controls. That means that most of my time was spent exploring the world, seeing where I ended up, and experimenting with the limited tools I had to see what happened. That often led to happy surprises, like learning that using a ping near a dark circle would open up new paths forward. Sometimes, it got me in trouble, like getting too close to an aggressive enemy circle that would eat me.
Without frequent video game crutches like overly obvious hints or chatty sidekicks, I mostly had to figure out the rules on my own. Like in many Zelda games, however, trying something just to see if it works — and finding that it would — was usually pretty satisfying. That experimentation also helped me better figure out how things in the game related to one another.
Like what you actually do in the game, its meaning is left for you to figure out as well. Because everything in the game is a series of circles, you have to interpret what they represent, like learning that dark red circles that block your path essentially function as walls. When I brought over a lonely circle pal to another group of friendly circles, it spun and chirped in a way that I can only describe as jumping for joy. Even the music “surrounds,” in its way; it’s ethereal and ambient, never overpowering your senses but also often humming quietly in the background as you wander around.
What Surrounds Us manages to do a lot of interesting things, both thematically and with its gameplay, and it does it all in a tight, three-hour playthrough. Who knew a cute little donut had so much depth?
What Surrounds Us is now available on PC via Steam.
