Abzû: Swimming Simulator

I was drawn to Abzû because of its very striking visual aesthetics, using bold colors and rich landscapes. Each of its maps are really large and colorful, and the sense of scale is amazing. I think one of the things it does best is create a sense of wonder for the player, specifically in this ocean landscape, which is pretty uncommon in games (I feel like most players hate underwater controls and all underwater “levels”). It also has a really cool sense of realism by pulling in a lot of actual sea creatures that exist and have existed in the past, which you can view up close by “meditating.”

However, one point of Abzû that I was disappointed by was its hard to understand plotline. I think that walking simulators generally do very well at having story structures where the player starts “in media res” and then figures out what happened as the game advances, but the metaphors tying the world of Abzû to our own via parallels weren’t very strong. It took me a really long time to realize that the previous society was using the “spirit water” was both a resource and power source and for restorative life-generative purposes. Their motivations for building the triangular machines also confused me, since they seemed to serve no purpose other than to consume the resource of the spirit water orbs. (It also took me a while to realize that the orbs were made out of the spirit water.) Basically, I think that it does really well in its landscapes and map making, possibly also its level design, but not as good in its worldbuilding.