Aquaria

Where/When/Why? Aquaria was one of the six games that came in the first ever Humble Indie Bundle back in May 2010, making it a nice bit of history. Apparently in all the excitement for this concept, I spent a cool $25 on the bundle (averaging out to $4.17 per game), a fact that seems scarcely believable to me now.

What/who? Aquaria was released in 2007, making it something of a forerunner for this glorious epoch of internet-distributed indies. It is a sidescrolling action-adventure game set in a world of sprawling underwater caverns. It was made by “Bit Blot”, a company consisting of two people whose website suggests just made Aquaria then parted ways. One of the guys from Bit Blot is part of a three-person team working on Night in the Woods which looks like it will be a good time and also might get released this year.

First install Yep, despite having had Aquaria in my library for 5, nearly 6 years, this was the first install. I didn’t even know what kind of game it was until last week.

Play time/completion? Maybe three or four hours? And no, once again, quitting on it with god knows how much still left to go. Most of it, probably.

How’d it go? Aquaria seems like the kind of game I should like. It’s a sidescroller with beautiful, bright, colourful artwork, which is normally an indicator that I will enjoy it (cf Trine, Braid, etc). The game uses light and setting pretty well. The main mechanic, the idea that you are a water-elf thing who learns these songs which you can use at will to adapt to different situations, is pretty good, and the subsequent swimming/fighting actions feel weighty and fluent enough to carry the game through.

So, what’s wrong with it?

Firstly, the treasure hunting. There’s a lot of treasure hunting to be done. You can find “recipes” to cook up single use items (to restore health and so on), and you can collect the ingredients that go into them. You’ll need to travel back to your home, a surprisingly vast uncomely bare-walled sort of cavern vaguely in the middle of the game world. Unsurprisingly you can also collect trinkets to adorn the aforementioned bare-walls and perhaps make your home more comfortable. Some of this item building might be necessary - healing salves for example are pretty useful as it can be pretty easy to get injured, however the process of accumulating the ingredients and swimming back to make the recipes is too time-consuming to be practical. Part of this is pure logistics - the map is huge and it is difficult to travel across it very fast.

Added to that, a lot of the items collected seem to come from enemies that you’ve killed, which is itself a time-consuming way to play the game and certainly not the one I would choose where possible, especially as in the game itself seems to encourage not doing this in other ways, eg by giving you powers to dodge enemies and or blend in and swish on past. Again, the distances you’ll need to traverse and explore are simply too huge for a great proportion of killing to be desirable, making the treasure hunting component a little sigh-inducing to say the least. I combated this by simply not partaking in it very much, which lead me to find the game much harder than it should have been because I never had the relevant items on hand to help me out when I got myself carelessly injured by rushing around too much.

Secondly, the plot. Oh god, the plot. What is going on here? The character you are given is one of those artifical blank-slates, as in they were supposedly someone before the game began, but in the intro their memory is wiped and so you’re both learning everything for the first time. The underwater world they inhabit is full of old-gods and strange law and light versus dark, but none of it feels very well thought out or at all tangible to the conflict you yourself are engaging in with mouse and keyboard (granted, I didn’t get very far in the game so maybe it all pays off later on, I don’t know). The faux-drama and head-clutching that happened every time we learned something new irked me no end.

Finally, the music throughout Aquaria is noticeably terrible, which is a little ironic given that the game-world includes a bit of pseudo-spiritual rubbish about “the verse” of nature, and of course the fact that your characters main mechanic is singing in-order-to-unlock the other mechanics. The Aquaria devs seem to have been aiming for bright/sparkly/tranquil/harmonious but have landed squarely on incessant/annoying. The main theme four chord loop is particularly poor, given how much you have to hear it and how short the loop is - sure, it varies endlessly, but not in ways which make it more listenable. Here’s a hint guys (paraphrasing my ever-suffering girlfriend here), putting one melody on top of a different melody doesn’t make a harmony!

So yeah, can’t say I can recommend Aquaria. Despite my gripes I don’t feel like it was too far off being a good game, but with my current level of patience (fourth game on the trot that I’m not seeing to completion!) those little things really added up to something unpleasant*. Maybe I should have played it on tablet instead.

Next up is Assassins Creed IV: Black Flag, all 26 gigs of which have downloaded while I’ve been writing up this rant. See you in a while!