11/20/2022 0 Comments Thatgamecompany abzu![]() Meditation mode allows you to follow the creature of your choosing. Whether it was a sluggish sea turtle lumbering overhead, or a small school of fish below me in the seaweed being eyed by a hungry predator, I could feel the ecosystem around me, even when I wasn’t directly looking at it.Ībzu knows this ecosystem is one of it’s biggest features, and the game even offers you the opportunity to pause the story at some points and zoom in on the underwater kingdom around you with a game pause state called “Meditation mode”. Throughout the game I was constantly enthralled with the live world around me. Set in an octopus’s garden under the sea (a far departure from the shifting desert of Journey) Abzu immediately attempts to forge its own path by injecting a unique element to Journey’s formula: a living, moving, flowing ecosystem. Matt’s brilliant art direction is evident throughout the entirety of Abzu. Let me make one thing clear right off the bat. I won’t spoil anything, but if you know the very general plot of Journey, you can pretty well guess how Abzu is going to go.Īlthough made by Giant Squid rather than ThatGameCompany, Abzu’s artistic director is Matt Nava, art director of both of ThatGameCompany games, Journey and Flower. It is worth noting these depth mines are used later in the story much more effectively. There are also some segments in which you must navigate around depth mines in order to (power on generaters?, open doors?, eat a special underwater plant? Frankly I can’t remember because it feels very standard and generic) in order to progress, but the challenge is minimal. The game does a good job of making these moments legitimately tense, but I can’t help but feel I’ve done the same thing before in journey. The things are beautiful and interesting to look at and the tiny submarine is adorable, but aside from a few small puzzles, the only real challenge in the game is hiding from things that are larger than you. It consists mostly of swimming around and looking at things, as well as chirping at a tiny submarine companion. Gameplay is unfortunately nearly a carbon copy of Journey, which is a shame in such a wonderful playground. And that sucks, because it needed to have a distinctly different story in order to distinguish itself from Journey. I wish I could say more without spoiling, but please know that it feels more like a dramatic re-imagining than a different story. Romeo and Juliet and West Side Story are very different stories but the story arc is the same. But even though the story itself is different, the story arc is the same. It’s different, markedly so, and I really do appreciate this. Unfortunately for Abzu the story might as well be copy and pasted from journey. Even at the end you’re not quite sure what exactly has happened, but you have a good general sense and the emotional impact is felt. Much like journey the story is told indirectly as you pass through several different environments. The story is the true sticking point of Abzu. Even if your environment is beautiful and your atmosphere lovely, man can not live on visuals and mood alone. Story is the make or break element of a game that has such minimal gameplay. Big shoes for Abzu to fill, if you ask me. It certainly wasn’t the first, and personally I don’t think it was the best, but it was the one game that proved non traditional game experiences could be commercially viable. ![]() Arguably, Journey is the game that helped spawn the large number of non traditional video games focusing on emotion, music, narrative, and experience over more traditional game mechanics. This is a game that sticks in the memory of many five years later, and is an early example of a commercially and critically successful “Art Game”. Journey received consistently high reviews in mainstream gaming publications, garnering a nine out of ten from GameInformer, IGN, and Wired. Just to refresh everyone’s memory, Journey is ThatGameCompany’s 2012 smash PS3 hit that was the fastest selling game on PSN at that time. But beware, dangers lurk in the depths.Īs with any spiritual successor, I would be remiss if I didn’t start my review with a mention of the game which inspired Abzu, namely the juggernaut that is Journey.
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