Aquaria

Realy nice Metroidvania with interisting mechanics and wonderful artworks. Thanks for support linux! :)

A beautiful game with many great moments, one of my favourite indie titles. Exploring the underwater world with its creatures, plants and ruins of ancient civilizations all the way down to the deepest, darkest parts of the ocean is a blast, and the game doesn't stop there - you also get to explore some of the world above the water's surface! The first time you break the surface of the sea is magnificent, and the game keeps mixing up mechanics and quirks so that it doesn't ever get boring. Truly one of my most favourite indie titles.

It took me a while to get to love this game, it doesn't communicate its mechanics very well, I watched a lot of walkthroughs to get into it. It has a vast map with rather empty stretches alternating with action filled rooms, there are puzzles and boss fights , lots of collectibles and secrets to discover. You'll get a partner and even pets with different combat abilities. You can ride seahorses. You can change your form and these forms give you different abilities. You can cook and discover new recipes which give you boosts and healing. And through the game a melancholy story slowly unfolds. Its a rich and rewarding game, movement is fun, apart from the platforming sections above ground, luckily these are optional. It's now one of my favorite games, I'd recommend it to everyone who loves exploration and is patient.

Metroidvania styled games are among my favorite genres and I really wanted to like Aquaria due to this fact but after spending well over 10+ hours on it, I had to call it quits, The game's large but utterly empty world, in which navigation is only achieved either by slow, plodding movement or by the few and far between "Warp Turtles" that only allow you to travel to very few locations in the entire map. The save point system has a lot to blame for this as well as there are no checkpoint in between the sparsely located save crystals, which means in the event of dying you'll have no other option but to start over from the last save point. Hence the exceeding backtracking that occurs becomes more pronounced, even for the genre's standards. Most of the combat boils down to shifting to the "Power" form and spamming the attack button and moving around to dodge, other transformations offer different attack methods but these are so unreliable and ineffective by comparison than shifting to Power mode will be the default for 90% of the combat you'll ever do. The cumbersome and inept item management and recipe system is in itself a case study as to how not to design a item management system. The method by which the player acquires healing and status enhancing items is by mixing ingredients dropped by the cannon fodder enemies and wildlife in the game, unfortunately experimentation with this system is discourages as the corresponding recipes are necessary to create said items. And if you wish to stockpile healing items before an boss fight get ready to spend a while "cooking" each item one at a time. The worse part of this game is how the levels are designed in such a way that while exploring you can inadvertently end up ejected into areas you had previously been losing precious progress, this occurring even in boss battle rooms, denying any possibility to reenter through that same point you exited. Avoid as this game is a poor representative of the genre.

The music, the lighting, the various foods you can craft, all create a very strange but fun experience in Aquaria. It is like a combination of a 2d platformer, with cooking/crafting/gathering, and exploring deeper/darker areas for story. Game mechanics wise it is also pretty varied, as the various modifications changes your powers. The game has skill mechanics attached to it as monsters attack in certain patterns. So you can dodge it if you pick up the patterns or use different buffs to counter them. It is kind of like a 2d open world simulator, where you start from a home, and it never disappears. You can always return to it, and the music is very nostalgic and peaceful, then turns ominious or dead quiet in the danger parts.