So anyway, I learned about Aquaria for the first time at this year's Game Developer Conference. In just a few seconds I could tell that it was a super-polished game that would be a lot of fun. As soon as I got home I bought it and started playing.
Aquaria is a great game, and the level of polish on it is INSANE given that it basically had two people working on it.
But wait! Before I go further, why should you listen to me at all? Who am I just to start reviewing things? Fair question. My name is Shane Wegner and I worked at Flashbang Studios (
www.flashbangstudios.com), another indie game developer not that different from Bit Blot. Actually, the guys at Flashbang know the guys from Bit Blot and are... comrades or some such? Anyway, at Flashbang we made a couple of different games: Beesly's Buzzwords, Glow Worm, Sealab 2021, and some that might never see the light of day like Mulligan's Island and Potion Motion. Our games really weren't the same size or scope or polish of Aquaria- ours were just little puzzle games that were kind of fun to play. I made the music and sound effects and voice with the help of some friends.
First of all, let me just try and get across this major idea to you:
games, really good and polished and fun and clean and excellent games- are REALLY hard to make. To really experience this for yourself, you have to try it. Try getting out a blank piece of empty, white paper and a pencil. Now, fill up that emptiness with something really good and clean and fun. Get going! Is your paper full yet? Is your game really easy to understand and fun?
The tendency is just to fill things up with glut. It's too easy to bury the fun of your game under menus and bolt on things that aren't clean or good. And the other thing that is really hard to do is to take something that is about 90% done and fill in that last 10% with pure polish. Until you've tried to get that last 10% of polish on there, all I can say is it's gruelling and excruciating and just the hardest thing there really is to do in terms of making a game.
Ok, that said, Aquaria takes that last 10% and just polishes the crap out of it. The overall game is just a beautiful pile of luscious graphics, beautiful music, and the overall gameplay is crisp, clean, elegant, and intuitive. These are REALLY hard things to get, and finding all of them in one place is rare. Finding out that only two people are responsible for all of them is even more insane. Here, I'll break down the categories.
Art- 5/5The graphics of the game are beautiful. Everything is very colorful and appealing, there are tons of lighting and paritcal and water effects. Most importantly, Aquaria has a completely unique style and theme. It says "Hey, this is a vast an beautiful underwater world" and then sticks to that. You have your caves and underwater temples, plant life and animal life, tropical shallows, glacial ice, but it all feels like it's part of ONE clean overall world. There is a consistent art style throughout, and it looks great. The world is full of colorful, weird, and wonderful sea life and architecture.
Music/Audio- 5/5My artist friend played Aquaria and she called it "An Orgasm of Art and Sound." As a sound guy, I agree. I really like the instrumental sound of the game. There are several musical themes that build up on each other as you explore more, and the overall sound has a rich, orchestral sound that I really like. Plus, the environmental audio really lends to the fact that you are underwater. I enjoyed the touches like how the singing engine has key matching so that you sing in tune with the background music. All told, listening to the music just made me happy.
Also, Naija's voice actress turned out perfect, just like the guys said at the GDC. Finding voice people who can really get the job done on a budget is great. Additionally- As per Portal, having a woman sing a song of some kind about what just happened in-game is TOTALLY acceptable. I really like Aquaria's ending song.
Gameplay- 4.5/5Moving around in this world is inuitive. It just makes SENSE. That's actually incredibly difficult to do. There are a ton of ways they could have messed up the design and made it cumbersome and painful even to just move around. But all told, they knocked it out of the park. As Naija, you will quickly understand how to swim through the world, use your new powers, explore the unknown. I really enjoyed the boss battles in the game for the most part. The cooking system added a fun extra dimension to the game, and maybe even more importantly it gave me the feeling that Naija was a hunter/gatherer omnivore actively engaged in her world. Aquaria takes a huge gameplay hint from Metroid and Zelda, Nintendo's explorer type games. At first you start in a bit of a sandbox, and as you move along the borders of it you find these gates and doors and obstacles that you can't get around. But each power you unlock gives you the ability to move through them, be it boulders in your way, strong currents, and later thin cracks and steam and vertical chimeys.
Feel- 5/5-I don't always consider this a category, but Aquaria has a good "feel" to it. It just has a way of making ENJOYABLE moments. When I first reached the area just in front of Naija's home, I was so happy just to be swimming around and able to sing and enjoy the sweet melody of the music in the area that I popped up the music menu and "sang along" with song for a good 2-3 minutes. The game didn't give me credit for doing that, but I just thought that Naija felt happy at the time and that she felt like singing. And I enjoyed singing along with the tune! Maybe it's an audio guy thing...
But there are a lot of other moments in the game that are just fun and feel good. The first time Naija jumps out of the water into the sunny air, and the camera makes it into an epic moment by zooming in. I like how the action in the game is punctuated by story elements, Naija mentions something, or we see an art vingette about the boss you just defeated and a bit of their story. Meeting up with Li was a good moment.
Games don't have to have "moments", but done right they add a lot. I think Aquaria does a great job at this.
Story- 3.5/5-At first, I thought Naija might be the love child of the Energy guys and the Mermaid ladies, explaining why she was a mix of both of the extinct civilizations. Then I found out she was painted into existence by the replicant creation a dead ghost boy with God Powers made to try and recreate his tortured memories of his beloved mother. Hmm. It was a little weird, but all told I could roll with it. I was skeptical of the story, but somehow the secret ending made me like it again. The idea of Naija being manipulated by Mia was very compelling to me. Is Mia planning to wage war on the entire Air Civilization? Will love conquer all or is Naija so far above that Li can never be more than a plaything to her as Mia stated? In crushing all her opposition, was Naija acting out Mia's will or her own inner potential as a conquerer?
Just to be clear, Story isn't actually a graded category. Who cares why Naija does what she does? Does Civilization have a story? Mario just wants to get a princess back or something, it's not Shakespeare. Stressing over a story about a game that is at least as much about simply exploring a beautiful world and finding new places just seems like extra stress to me.
Specific Constructive Criticisms-I won't just bag on the game without suggesting improvements. People who do that are naysayers. I like the game a lot, here are some ideas and suggestions I have that could maybe have made it even better.
Challenge- One minor place in the game that could be improved is the challenge level. The game starts out quite smooth and easy. The Energy Temple challenged me a bit, and scared me a bit, without being too terrifying or cruel. As I explored out in to the open waters, the first really crowded rooms with homing projectile enemies was pretty hard! But then I adapted and came up with a strategy I started to call Swim'n'Spam. Basically I just learned how to completely unload energy on the enemies and swim evasively until they all died. Overall, that strategy took me through the game. It got to be kind of easy sailing for a while. A few places like the Abyss were almost too easy- there were only 1 or 2 dangerous enemies in the whole place. (Although I understand the Darkness is in its own way an enemy, albeit a sort of passive one.)
So
Challenge Criticism Part 1- is "Some rather long stretches of the game are actually pretty easy and un-intense, in terms of the battle challenges. I could have done with just a bit more friction or slightly more dangerous enemies.) I think the challenge of facing, say, a Sea Dragon is pretty good, that's about 3.5/5. Just owning the occaisional crab or other relatively un-dangerous enemy is only about a 1/5 though. Exploring in low-pressure environments can be fun, if it goes TOO long I start to crave juts a bit more action.
Suggested Solution 1- A few new classes of enemies. We have the long range Snipers. I think it might be good if there were Flankers- enemies that work in conjunction with the snipers. While the Snipers bombard you with homing projectiles, the Flankers sneak around behind you and then charge- specifically if they "know" you are zoomed in using long range. That would make you stay on your toes and not completely bombard an area at long range. You never know when a Flanker is going to sneak up on you. Other enemy types would be those that fire directly at you the more you move, you have to hold still to shake them, or enemies that can start absorbing your shots if you simply spam shots on them- you have to let them "cool down" their defenses perhaps? More mixes of enemies and slightly more intensity would help.
Challenge Criticism Part 2 is that the level of Boss challenge can jump up to 5/5 pretty fast. That can be good, but my complaint here is the interaction with the Food System. You can in fact get lots of healing food in the game, in truth the availability of food was pretty good. But the problem was this: Because you COULD make foods that healed you a great deal, you were eventually REQUIRED to eat a lot of food unless you were a twitch master.
You're going to take damage from the Bosses unless you are a super twitch Ninja, that's just a fact. To counteract this, you could scarf down a +2 health item and then some nice Vegetable soup, which would give you something like +5 health over several seconds. My real complaint here is that pausing the game to pop into the food menu was rather action-breaking. I guess this is more a Food Interface than a Boss Challenge suggestion, although they are interrelated.
Suggested Answer- The best thing I can think of is to use the slickest related interface I can think of- the Potion Belt from Diablo 2. If I had a little hotbar with 10 slots or so and could put my favorite foods in there and just click or hotkey them to eat, I wouldn't have to pause to pull up the food menu to eat my way through a boss fight. Some of the harder boss fights I found were 50% about my ability to maneuver and use my skills and 50% a check on how many really nice foods I had stored away. I don't mind this, it was kind of interesting. (And I've played enough WoW that I don't mind building up a small mountain of "consumables" for a "boss attempt.)
I should note I really liked the boss fights, and their "Phases" and mechanics. Getting a boss to spit out a merman, dragging the merman into the poison of corruption, then tricking the boss into eating it again was very cool and reminded me of World of Warcraft in a good way.
Oh, by the way, I commissioned this satirical picture of what I assumed the end result of Eating My Way Through Boss Fights would do to Naija in the long run. I mean it in good fun. Have a few more Perogi's Naija, you'll win for sure! ; -)
Food Suggestion Epsilon- I think I like foods that build up long-term stats permanently better than ones that give me a +20 second boost of godliness. (I am thinking about making dishes that permanently up my shot power as opposed to those which temporarily give me like +3 shot power. I am a miser and can't really enjoy the fun of such a short term boost.)
Quicksave and Quickload- A few challenges in the game, like shimmying across the bubbles in the Artic or in the tropics to get Rukh eggs, are what I call "Irritainment"- a mixture of entertaining and irritating. Jumping is fast and fun, but has the tendency to make it where you make the first 90% of the jumps great, then on the last one fll back down to the start. The upside is, when you eventually do make it, you feel like the King (or Queen) of the world. The downside is if that takes 10 minutes to get a lot of people are quitting in frustration. I really enjoy a lot of Classic SNES games o emulators where I can hit F5 to quicksave and F7 to quickload. It reduces the chain-challenge of long runs, but lets me feel good for solving each individual jump. If I could quicksave right before a long series of jumps, then quickload if I failed and try again, I would feel at harmony with even long jumping puzzle series. I did like using plant vines to reduce (but not entirely eliminate) the toughness of jumping puzzles.
Fish Cave- I had a really hard time seeing the Fish Cave was there because it is so dark and pixelly back there. I swam RIGHT by it when I was exploring the area. "I wonde what is in that rock nook?" I thought to myself. Then I thought "Look, self, if I explore every little pixel in the game, I will go nuts. They aren't going to make me hunt the pixel THAT much." Suggested Solution- A fish particle system where a few fish are swimming in and out of the fish cave, as a visual clue that there is SOMETHING there. I like little hints like that. I would have enjoyed the game a lot more if I had gotten "Travel Form" earlier. I can't believe I swam right by it.
Li-moticons-
I liked some of the moments with Li, like taking off his helmet and seeing how happy Naija was to have met a friend. Li in game came across a little flat and inhuman in game. A few moments, like how Naija will embrace him if you leave them together long enough, really capture what I think could be best about them. Suggestion- I think a few cheap tricks could really give the illusion of Li being much more alive. A few more slightly exaggerated facial expressions (surprise, rage, sadness, happiness) that pop up from time to time could be great. I think it would be great if a ! popped up above Li's head and he swam over to certain underwater landmarks and statues. You wouldn't have to even explain it, it would just be that Li had found an underwater treasure/landmark was planning to report it back to the archeological societies of his civilization. It could even be a fun mini-game- give Li a Checklist of places he'd like to see, and when you swim by them, he reacts for ten seconds or something and it checks it off his list. A few other reactions, like say something takes Naija under half health, he puts on his angry face and starts shooting at that thing at 300% speed for a few seconds in berserk rage could make him seem more alive.
Anyway, all told Aquaria was as good and polished as a game like Super Metroid, and enjoyed it as much. It is almost a miracle that so much goodness could exist in one place thanks to such a small crew. I got about 20 hours of pure fun out of it for $30, a very good hours to dollar entertainment ratio. Anyone who is simply bashing the game like it were any other effort with a million dollar budget and a crew of 20 developers who should have had time to do it the one "perfect" way don't understand how incredible it is that a game this polished even got released. It's really easy for games to die out. Flashbang probably has 4 stillborn games that never saw the light of day. The imperfect game that exists is better than three perfect games stuck in the realm of imagination. Aquaria exists, and an amazing amount of it got it just right. Aquaria raised the bar for polish, art, audio, and gameplay for the entire indie games community.
Final Score- 5/5 stars, Achievement in Art, Achievement in Audio, Gold Total Entertainment Value
Aquaria is a really good game that many people would likely enjoy.
