Aquamarine

I backed this game because of the stunning graphics! And on the visual and auditory side, Aquamarine absolutely delivers! However, the whole gameplay and UI is unnecessarily confusing. Moving around in the submarine feels very cumbersome. After a short while, I gave up on the game, because it felt I was fighting more with the interface and gameplay than the actual environment.

While I like the art style of this game, it reminds me of Deep Space Derelict and other smimilar ones, it is quite a rough experience. The interface, is seemingly intentionally, over-complicated to the point of being useless. I never had a game before where I was forced to restart just in order to get reacquainted with the controls - can't make head nor tails of them. It actually gives me headaches trying to figure it out. In a contest for the most cumbersome and convoluted gui this game's developers would score high. If you struggle to understand and use a game's seemingly simple controls and have to resort to just randomly clicking things it's a clear indication of very bad design. Other things are broken as well. After the first dive the playing field is literally clouded without any explanation or option to circumvent or avoid it. You get attacked and your pod is damaged yet you cannot see anything and again have to rely on blindly clicking random spots to achieve something. Twice I actually managed to escape and travel to a different area, but could not reproduce it because I don't know how and why it happened. So either the game is not yet finished and little more than an interactive trailer or so full of bugs that is's unplayable. If you want a good and interesting game, look somewhere else. (I knew beforehand that many people have trouble with this game, but there were a few favorable reviews and opinions, so I decided it'd be worth a try, especially given the art style. Sadly, it's not.)

moebial studios interoduce themselves as "small international artist collective", and it shows. the game is pretty, at least if you like its comic style. but the ui is obscure, the initial tutorial a mere nod at a vague explanation, and its mechanics never completely explained. also it's pretty buggy, quite often the main character just gets stuck waiting for turn resolution that never comes. and like so often gog updates lag behind itch and steam by several versions.

The game has a fair amount of survival strategy but stays rather simple once you figure things out. Most of the story progression is revealed back at camp. I can't say, having played to the credits, that there is much story about the planet itself, mostly about the character you play. If there was anything else, I may have missed it given how little information is available about the game at present. The actual exploration has a few simple puzzles and none of them leave you wondering how they expected you to solve that. If you can't solve a puzzle you are probably missing an upgrade or some visual information that is being concealed. There's still a few random bugs every now and then but nothing that keeps you from finishing the game. I kinda think more of the game's visual information could have been better documented. Things like map icons are left unexplained so I am not sure what they are supposed to mean. I thought there was going to be more story and exploration than there actually is. Given the relaxed play-style, I thought there was going to be a longer journey to the ending than there actually is, at a leisurely pace no less. The game ends with what I consider a cliffhanger after you have explored just 3 areas. This game is probably best experienced by the casual gamer who prefers a leisurely paced game and doesn't care how long it lasts.