Aquaria

The game has beautiful music and art, and a sprawling, open world that gives you total freedom to explore it. It can seem derivative of things like Ecco, but it's much more its own thing than it first appears. It's also much darker, and more difficult, than you might expect. Things get pretty weird toward the end, down below the Abyss...

This game is gorgeous, with an unforgettable soundtrack and beautiful visuals representing Naija's undersea world. She may not look not look like a mermaid, but Naija has all the characteristics of one. These were what convinced me to try this, even though I'm not into these types of games.

Released in 2007, and the winner of the grand prize at 2008's IGF festival, Aquaria was part of an early wave of imaginative, high quality indie games - a movement that would really kick off with smash hits such as Braid, Fez and Derek Yu's own Spelunky a few years later. You control a Naija, a mermaidy water spirit, who has to navigate an underwater world and can morph into various different forms to unlock new abilities that bestow different skills and access to new game areas. The main innovations are the controls - primary control is with the mouse, guiding Naija around. The song system brings up a radial menu of different notes that can be sung to transition to different forms or use abilities. The fact that you can use hotkeys to access these abilities, or use a controller instead undermine these innovations, and hint at the fact that although initially the mouse controls feel very natural and intuitive, by the time you get to the more challenging parts of the game they're a bit of a chore. The game still looks gorgeous, all the art was hand-drawn by Derek Yu. There are lots of beautiful underwater vistas to explore, including tropical lagoons, sunken dungeons and a kelp forest. The locations do start to feel a bit samey, and although there are plenty of secrets to discover you'll do plenty of backtracking and may find these areas become monotonous. You save your points at red crystals dotted around the world, and can use sea turtles to travel between main locations - although these aren't frequent or well-placed enough to ever feel that useful. Of the different forms, only 1 of the main ones has an attack, which means that most of the time you'll only use the other forms for a single ability, which is a shame. It's a beautiful game, and can enchant but can also frustrate, which is maybe why it's not endured as some other high profile indie released of the period have.

It is impossible to save and load progress in this game... /Nie można zapisywać i wczytywać postępów w tej grze

Immediately after starting the game you will be greeted by exposition form a very disinterested sounding voice actress. And soon you must realize that she will not shut up through the entire game. Mercifully you can turn off the voices, but sadly the incessant exposition was only one of many things that soured this game for me. - First off, the music. It just drones on, i got tired of it after ten minutes. - Hope you enjoy memorizing button combinations, because that is something the game will force you to do plenty. In order to use Naija's special abilities like blocking or lifting stuff, you have to enter the according button combination every single time. - Backtracking. I may not have played long enough to acquire some sort of teleportation spell, and while the movement speed can be increased with certain potions, travelling between places felt like it took forever. - Respawn points. There are none. If you die you go back to the last time you saved. So if you haven't saved in 2 hours because save points are rare to come by, kiss all your progress goodbye. I did not finish Aquaria. I barely played a couple of hours before i got fed up with it. It may be a case of not having aged well, it is nearly a decade old after all, but at this point i have played so many indie games that are so much more enjoyable and less frustrating than this.