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Ah, finally the review of Aquaria – Bit Blot’s most wonderful underwater side scroller. And done by none other than The Mac Gamer’s first writer not to be me! Hooray!
A big hello to M. James Peders (lots of spam and viagra offers please), a welcome member to the crack team of, er, reviewers working over time, full time, part time to bring you the best reviews and shoes in the Mac world…
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I’ll admit, I wasn’t quite sure what to expect when I installed Aquaria on my MacBook Pro. The developer’s designation as a “fantasy” game runs the gambit of genres, from adventure to RPG to RTS. Even after starting to play the game, I still wasn’t sure what I was in for. But then I gave it a few hours…
Aquaria is quite possibly one of the most compelling, engrossing, beautiful games that I have played in a very long time. This game is smooth like melted butter on toast. It is deeper than the Mariana Trench. It is adventure-gaming crack. It will get you hooked, and you will find yourself staring at the computer, blurry-eyed, hours after you started, still trying to find new caves to explore. Aquaria is that good.
You play Naija, a member of a species of aquatic beings. You wake up to find yourself with no memory of who or where you are. All you have to go on are a few sparse images that come to you in dreams. Since you find yourself in a series of caves, it seems that the best solution to this dilemma is to begin exploring said caverns and see if you can decipher the mystery that is your life.
As Naija learns about her surroundings and abilities, so too does the player, in a nice implementation of a player tutorial. We soon find out that Naija has the power of The Verse. By singing combinations of notes, Naija can cast a wide range of spells – although you will have to discover these spells over the course of the game. You start with the ability to cast an energy shield around yourself, and move from there to moving objects and beyond. You will eventually be able to change your form, imbuing you with powers that you will need to defeat the various denizens of the deep that are out to prevent your progress through the underwater world.
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The inhabitants of the briny deep range from small, harmless schools of fish, playful jellyfish, and tiny shrimps and crabs, to more dangerous and exotic varieties, from giant fire-breathing amphibians to deep-dwelling giants that will swat your health away in a couple swoops of their giant claws. The more innocuous creatures are easily dispatched with a few well-placed shots while in your energy form. The other larger beasties will quite often take much more complex strategies to defeat them. During these battles, the game takes on a decidedly old-school shoot’em-up feel, as you look for patterns in their attacks.
When you dispatch some of the smaller creatures of the game, you will often be rewarded with an ingredient that can be used to make food. Again, as you progress through the game, you will learn different recipes that allow you to make food to heal yourself, give you a boost in speed, boost your defensive abilities, etc. Interestingly enough, if you do not know a recipe that calls for a particular combination of ingredients, you will make sea loaf, which increases your health by an extremely small percentage. Eventually, Naija will complain about eating too much sea loaf!
As you wind your way through the caverns that make up Naija’s world, you will find yourself faced with many a puzzle. Some are quite simple, while others are very oblique. And the game is in no hurry to hand the answers over. Many puzzles will not be solved until you progress further in the game, requiring you to revisit areas later after you have acquired certain abilities. And while Aquaria’s mapping system does a good job of showing your progress in a particular area of the game, there is no facility for showing your progress in the areas of the game that you do not currently occupy, making remembering where you’ve been and what was there a huge part of the puzzle-solving mechanics.
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The story of Aquaria is deep and involved. It is played out slowly as you progress through the game, with Naija narrating the progress, and quite often switching to cut-scenes that show bits of the history of the land, or Naija’s own history. The voice-acting is top-notch, and the dialog is well-written.
All these elements combined, you get a game that invokes a couple of classic game titles in my mind. The over-all experience and progression of the game is reminiscent of Metroid, as you explore an extensive system of caves, facing puzzles that often cannot be overcome until you acquire further abilities. The use of music calls up memories of the LucasArts adventure classic Loom, in which your warlock character was able to cast spells by playing tones on the mystical titular instrument. The experience of Aquaria is at once familiar and unique. It is a game that will keep you up until the wee hours of the morning, and you won’t regret it.
I cannot give this game a higher recommendation than go…now! Get it! Explore the underwater caves and solve the mysteries of the deep.
What are you waiting for?
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I played the demo through, and I have to agree with the reviewer… the production quality, interface, voice acting, music, and graphics are all top notch. A few of the puzzles were frustrating because there were no indications of how to proceed.
The real problem, though, is that it’s a $30 title with ZERO replayability. At a lower price point I would have registered it, but for $30 I decided to pass.
In my interview with John Champlin from Ambrosia, he had this to say:
What I didn’t post was that John said that the game has much to explore, so much in fact that you won’t be able to cover it through in one shot.
Also, what do you mean by re-playability? Much of the game is narrative and atmosphere. You should have enough fun playing through again and enjoying that?
One thing that I regrettably left out of the review is that there is a level editor included with the full game, allowing for user-created content. Now, of course, this depends on people actually creating content, but hopefully this game will catch on and a community will develop. But, even beyond that, I think that $30 is a fair price for over 20 hours of gameplay.
So, it’s “Intel-ONLY ?” and NO PowerPC usage ??
Aquaria for Mac runs on Intel Macs and Macs with a G4 processor or higher.
I play just fine with a PB G4 at 1.33 GHz and 1.5GB SDRAM, frame buffer effects off, and at 1440 x 900 res!
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Hip hop is my life, man. I dream about being a DJ or maybe a producer some day. My family’s on some hard times though. People with the ducats get to the top usually. Though J-Zay is from the hood.
The review mentions the voice acting, but the sound design as a whole is just amazing — and subtle. Here are some examples I’ve noticed so far (and I’m sure there are more as I progress).
All the menu sound effects are underwater. The oceanic background sound is always there but never obtrusive, but it changes from level to level (the open ocean sounds different from the abyssal depths).
The incidental music — not the background music, but the music associated with “The Verse” that Naija would be hearing too — has the same flavor as Naija’s own Verse songs. It is an effective leitmotif.
When Naija powers up in her energy form, you can hear that she is close to overload — that much is expected — but the sound hovers right at the edge of your hearing, as if its pitch is fluctuating in and out of your range. And when she releases it, there is a deep, watery thrum, accentuated by a choice visual ripple effect.
And when Naija fires salvo after salvo of energy shots, she laughs like she’s one step closer to the destructive madness that claimed the civilization from which she got her energy abilities. A very nice example of a sound effect supporting the storyline.