Aquaria

I’m writing today to show you a glimpse of an indie game that has as much to offer you as almost any console game I’ve ever played (I make special exceptions for truly exceptional games, like Smash Bros). The game is Aquaria an adventure game set underwater much in the lines of Metroid with bits slightly reminiscent of Final Fantasy and borrowing gameplay elements from top-down shooters. I found the game completely by accident as I was trying out the various games from gamma 256 and one of the games, Célu, was not available to download, so I went looking for it, in the process finding a trailer for Aquaria which was another project by the same designer that he was working on with one other person. The video looked amazing and I immediately forgot about Célu to go look for more info on Aquaria.

As it turned out I had discovered the game only a day after its online-exclusive release. As it was, the website for the game was down and I only managed to dig up the off-site purchase link from the Google cache of what used to be the site. After a quick email exchange with the guy, he assured me that though the site was down, the purchase and download process would proceed without problem, so I purchased without hesitation and I have certainly not been disappointed.

While playing this game, one of the things that makes it shine is the fact that for an indie game, most people will be going into it with somewhat lower expectations than they would have for the game if it had been published to a mainstream channel, perhaps on a modern gaming console like through the 360 Arcade. This game takes advantage of that to blow you out of the water every chance it gets (pun not necessary, but intended).

You will definitely get your money’s worth if you rate a game by playtime. Judging from what I’ve seen so far it’s got at least 15, if not 25 hours of gameplay to it. A large amount of that time is spent exploring the massive underground world that has been created for you to enjoy. Metroid games are well known for the tried and true formula of blocking off most of the map and slowly opening it up to you as you gain new abilities that let you progress past what used to be unsurmountable obstacles. You won’t find much of that here, because while this formula still applies to this game to some extent, it isn’t nearly as linear as many of the adventure games I could compare it to. It has a clear sequence of abilities that you will have to follow, but you will have an incredible amount of space to explore before you run out of places to go. There are several game elements that aren’t original by any means, but do a great job of supplementing the main gameplay. As you collect various pieces of seafood and underwater plants you can combine different types according to recipes to create various types of healing and buffing items (a la Tales of Symphonia). Your various powers are activated by singing a 3 or 4 note tune played by activating various colored symbols that appear in a circle around you. You can both use skills to interact with your surroundings and to transform into alternate forms (a la The Legend of Zelda).

When swimming around in the waters of Aquaria you have several control schemes to choose from. The default one that is taught to you at the beginning of the game is a simple point and click scheme where you click and hold down, and your character will swim towards your cursor. This works fine in the first parts of exploration but once you find yourself in need of a bit of deft maneuvering while trying to play one of your transformation tunes in the middle of battle with a giant nautilus by the name of Nautilus Prime, the mouse alone just doesn’t cut it. Luckily you can swim around with the classic ‘WASD’ and worry about shooting with the mouse. This should get you through most situations, but what I’ve liked the best is using the included support for my wired Xbox 360 controller. Even then there are a few things best left up to the mouse, like menu navigation, but after a little testing it’s clearly the control to use. I do have a few qualms with the controller support, but not nearly enough to make me consider using anything else. For one, using the mouse, you can target one enemy to be hit with your charged shot which you just can’t do with the controller. That, I can live with, but what really bothered me was that there was no way to use the controller to pan the screen around your character to look around like you can with the middle mouse button. That, and you can’t zoom in or out of the map with the controller, which you could just use the mouse wheel for otherwise.

To remedy the last two of these three complaints I wrote a small AutoHotkey script with the help of my friend Josh which lets you click in the right analog stick to click the mouse wheel, and move it up and down to scroll the mouse wheel up and down. It works great with the game just running in the background. Hopefully those things can be changed in the game and render the script useless. In the meantime you can grab it yourself right here. Just run it before you start Aquaria. You can close it from the system tray after you quit Aquaria. If you’d like to see the AutoHotkey source, download it here.

It is obvious the music has been written with more attention to quality than I am used to seeing in indie games. It’s just right for the underwater environments, mostly calm and soothing melodies that you’ll be humming right along with. Occasionally you’ll run into slightly more stressful situations, and there too, the music does exactly what it needs to do. It’s a perfect fit.

All this praise and I’ve only just gotten to the visuals? That’s right there’s more where the rest of that came from and again my expectations for an indie game were surpassed. The graphics aren’t the type to compete with Crysis or UT3, what we have here is a carefully crafted world that is both immersive and beautiful. The particle and bubble effects are well placed and unobtrusive, and the different forms your character can take on each have their own distinct design and often somewhere on the scale between cool and awe-inspiring. For people with a bit of video card in their computers, there is also a nice ripple effect that quickly spreads across your screen whenever you make a significant disturbance in the water.

If you can’t tell, I really liked this game. I purchased what I thought looked like a cool indie game and I wanted to have some fun with it while supporting a developer or two in the indie gaming scene. What I ended up getting was an amazingly well written and polished adventure game that puts a lot of stuff you see on consoles to shame. There is a definite attention to quality and production values that I never saw coming. I could easily see this going mainstream on the Xbox 360 Arcade or adding a bit of motion sensing and showing up on the Wii, maybe even being adapted for the DS. Right now there is only a Windows version available, but a Mac version is promised and one for Linux is reportedly not unlikely (as it is, it runs fairly well in Wine, the in-game cursor just doesn’t show up). Swim over to the site at http://bit-blot.com/aquaria to download the demo and see what I’ve been talking about.