Games worth your time this week
Following on from my previous post where I highlighted two playworthy games, let’s dig in again and talk briefly about two titles worth playing this week. And no, neither of them will be No Man’s Sky.
ABZÛ
This is an odd one. It’s less game and more experience (I’m gently nodding to No Man’s Sky here), and it comes from some folks who were part of the masterful team behind Journey.
ABZÛ takes place underwater, and much like Journey, it attempts to make you fall in love for just a few hours. It’s a beautiful, astonishing and captivating game set in a deep sea landscape featuring schools of fish & other oddities to capture your imagination.
The story & gameplay in ABZÛ is less about directly outputting a tale woven by characters. Rather, it’s about discovery and a journey through an ancient underwater universe. Through hieroglyphs, architecture and interactions with other sea-creatures, you’ll journey the depths of a lost, hidden world from a time long past. You play a nameless diver that must rebuild a lost land that was destroyed by some prior apocalypse. The story isn’t very direct, much like Journey, Flower or Flow, but it’s there, ever-present and when it hits you, it really hits.
ABZÛ is available on Steam & PS4.
Firewatch
I talked about Firewatch earlier in the year, but I feel since we’re on a nice, calming vibe, we should get into the game that really kicked the year off for a lot of folks (myself included).
This is a beautiful game with a very distinct art direction and an interesting collaboration between Campo Santo & Panic. It’s interesting because Panic is more known for building very awesome Mac productivity software.
Firewatch is a mystery title set in the Wyoming wilderness, where your only emotional lifeline is the person on the other end of a handheld radio. The game less about the Wyoming wilderness than it’s about relationships; particularly your relationship with a past flame, and your current relationship with that person on the other end of a radio.
