Quick Review: ABZÛ

Water levels tend to be the most difficult to create due to physics, as well as the most despised  due how often they’re mishandled; therefore, making a game that’s nothing but a giant water world takes some massive cojones.

ABZÛ, developed by Giant Squid, published by 505 Games, and released to Steam on August 2nd, 2016, took that challenge head-on. And it may be one of the best water-themed games out there. The game was directed by Matt Nava and its soundtrack was composed by Austin Wintory, two names you might be familiar with if you’ve played the game Journey, released in 2012, a similar experience of exploration of a large world with the unraveling of a silent narrative.

Silly me, I forgot my air tank.

My reason says "You're gonna get lost." My heart says
"This is too pretty, I must explore further."

In this short atmospheric experience (roughly 2-3 hours), you’re a lone diver visiting the great depths of the ocean. Swim around the marine life and venture through impressive, colorful and breathtaking underwater locations. And, bonus, there’s no air meter, so you don’t need to go back to the surface to catch your breath. Hm, odd that. You can swim close to the fishies, and even ride the bigger ones by holding Shift. The fish seem to be at their natural sizes too, so you can be surprised at the size of some creatures you meet. Why yes, you even see whales. As for the environments, you start at the low-depth seafloor, to a land of seaweed, and keep on going deeper all the way down to the remnants of a mysterious sunken city…

Pictured: Not actually the sunken city.

The beautiful environments struck me to my core-al.

The game has some light puzzles to solve at every chapter in order to progress. The entire story is told without words – take in what you see, and come to your own conclusions. The game is linear, but features large areas to explore nonetheless, so you can spend a lot of time looking for everything. Three things to look for: Shark statues letting the diver meditate on the surrounding environment, allowing them to look at all the fish in the area; little panels to activate, which causes several members of a species of fish to come out and add some more life to the world; and seashells to gather. There are achievements for finding everything.

The game is very resource-extensive, however, so be sure your computer can run it – I personally could, but the game struggled to keep a reasonable rate of frames per second. I also played it with a keyboard, although the Steam page strongly recommends a controller; and indeed, it was somewhat tricky to control the character with the WASD keys and the mouse’s buttons. I had to remember to hold the right-click button to swim forward, while redirecting the character with the keyboard. The camera was extremely finicky, there was no way in the options to manipulate its reaction speed; as a result, merely trying to redirect it with Q or E made it swing wildly around, it was difficult to get the best angle to see what came next.

Lastly, I also met a few glitches. At one point, the camera stopped following the character, forcing me to reload. I wasn't sure whether it was an artistic choice or a genuine glitch. Also, the game crashed badly just before the very last chapter, but my progress wasn’t lost. So, it did have a few annoyances, but nothing that turned me off from it.

This is where the camera stopped following me.

In spite of these issues, did I enjoy my experience? Yes. It’s a good game, though I guess I would have probably enjoyed it a lot more with the right specs and a controller. I don’t regret playing it at all, it’s a gorgeous experience. It’s less about action and more about exploration and taking in the sights and the story, but games like these are very welcome. I have also heard a lot of good about Journey, the previous game by Jenova Chen that also had Matt Nava as an artist. I should check it out someday. In the meantime, I recommend ABZÛ; just make sure you can run it first. Abzû is usually available on Steam for 20$.