I don’t want to spoil what these are or what the storyline is really all about, but it’s safe to say that there’s more to ABZÛ than immediately meets the eye. At times, ABZÛ overplays its hand, practically battering your senses in its drive to amaze, astonish and enthral, but when it hits the mark it can be powerful, producing some of the most extraordinary scenes of the gaming year. The biggest moments are complemented by a powerful orchestral score, heavy on the harp and choir when it’s time to go for gob-smacked awe. And that’s before the game goes sci-fi on you, switching from The Blue Planet to 2001: A Space Odyssey and back again in a way that feels organic, part of the tale.
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At times it feels like a series of dreamscapes, as you swim with whales or through coral reefs that suddenly overwhelm with a riot of colour.
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Despite its deliberately abstract scenery and often carefully restricted palette, ABZÛ knows how to dish out huge moments of wonder, filling the screen with massive shoals of tiny fish, dragging you through vast, inhuman architecture, pulling you further down into the depths where the weirdest, most alien fish live. That doesn’t mean it’s quiet and unassuming. Instead, there’s something quiet and meditative about much of ABZÛ, as if it’s taking you on some kind of inner journey. This isn’t a tough, demanding action game or even much of a mental challenge. The emphasis is always on discovery and interaction with your fellow creatures. The action sequences can be exciting without ever becoming challenging, and what puzzles there are won’t hold you back for long. It’s divided into acts, each one consisting of a journey through a different underwater environment, pushing you to explore, putting you through some task or challenge, then ending with a trip through a whirlpool portal to a strange, luminous shrine.
You’ll encounter a shark – is it friend or enemy? – and discover statues where you can chill out and meditate, with the camera switching to following the fish, flicking from one shoal to another with a twitch of the left stick.Īnd it’s around this point that ABZÛ’s structure becomes apparent. Before long, you encounter your first sunken ancient ruins, the blue and gold walls bearing large-scale murals that seem to have something to do with the diver. You can swim around and play with the fish, find a small underwater drone and use it to demolish net-like barriers. The controls do a great job of capturing the feel of moving and turning gracefully through water, and while the camera isn’t always all that helpful, the game does a fine job of taking control of it, either to point you in the right direction or create an effect. The way fish move, flock and respond to your movements is utterly believable. The underwater environments are convincing and beautifully lit, rendering both the scenery and fish without much surface detail, but with a real eye for shape and motion. Divided into discrete sections and chambers, it’s not a wide-open sandbox in the vein of Endless Ocean, but instead one location leads to another, drawing you deeper into the sea – and the game.Īt first your objectives seem obscure, even empty. You can also make nice with the local fauna, even grabbing them with a squeeze of the left-trigger to catch a lift.
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You begin floating in a tropical ocean, where you’re free to explore a series of areas, activating weird fish-spawning zones with a tap of a button, your mainstay for environmental interactions. Your mute protagonist is a black-and-gold-clad diver with the ability to breathe underwater without any special apparatus. Like Journey, ABZÛ likes to be all mysterious. For all the similarities, it also has its own ideas. None of this means that ABZÛ is Journey’s equal, but it tries for many of the same ambitious targets and sometimes hits them. It uses the same composer, Austin Wintory, and feels a lot like Journey, or at least an underwater equivalent. Developed by Giant Squid, a studio founded by Journey’s art director, Matt Nava, it echoes Journey not just in its looks but in its minimalist gameplay style and multi-act structure. Until thatgamecompany delivers a real follow-up to Journey, ABZÛ could be the next best thing.