After disappearing from the public eye for about two years, Hydrophobia has re-emerged from hiding sporting a brave new look: Episodic digital distribution!

Originally announced as a full retail release, Dark Energy Digital, the team behind Hydrophobia, have decided to split the story into three episodes to be on Xbox Live Arcade. They've gone out of their way to assure players that the quality of the experience hasn't been watered down (at least, not in the negative sense) to suit digital distribution, and that each episodes will contain at least five hours of gameplay. The three promised episodes are planned to be released across the course of a year, and could lead to additional episodes being produced if the first three are well received.

For those who need the recap, Hydrophobia was revealed in 2007 as an action-adventure game that put the player in control of Kate Wilson, a passenger on board a ship in the not too distant future. It's no ordinary boat, however... The Queen of the World is more akin to a floating city than a transport vessel, and it happens to contain ten years of research efforts from NanoCell, a company devoted to solving the near catastrophic lack of clean water in the year 2051.

Hydrophobia begins moments before the head of NanoCell steps forward to finally reveal the efforts of their research to the world, a speech that is suddenly interrupted by sleeper cell terrorists that have spent years taking up positions aboard The Queen of the World in preparation for this day. As bombs go off and a computer virus wipes out the ship's security systems, Kate is sent plummeting to the depths of the vessel in a runaway elevator. Now she's got to escape from the steadily rising flow of water, while dealing with the perils of a locked down environment with no security access, and her own deeply rooted fear of water.

The game features realistic water physics, with environments that will fill with water as it flows in, rushing around objects and filling empty spaces, rather than just slowly rising from the bottom of the map. In addition to this, an ever-changing variety of paths and scenarios are presented according to how Kate handles certain situations, hopefully making for a genuinely tense situation that will make you aware of how your actions affect the environment.