Not so when it comes to our oceans, with their unseen topography, and mysterious schools and congregations.Ībzû offers the chance to explore the unknown, not by questing through the stratosphere to outer space, but by opening up an unfamiliar universe just beneath the waves. There are few wonders and surprises left for us to find here on terra firma. Through Google's satellites, our world is mostly mapped. Despite these reservations, Abzû’s offer is enticing. And, despite the richness of the surroundings, the game can after a while feel somewhat thin and repetitive. Your diver, lithe and manoeuvrable when gliding at speed, becomes a more cumbersome tank in enclosed spaces or, when you temporarily depart the water to flick some switch. While in time you adjust to the game's peculiar rhythms, its unusual peaks and troughs, you never quite feel at home with the controls.
![abzu video game abzu video game](https://gamethrill.io/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/2-189.jpg)
Its story, like its waters, grows darker the deeper you go. There are rusty chains and creaking gates, and more futuristic props, too: triangular contraptions set into the rock with unblinking red eyes. There are pristine underwater temples, busy with hieroglyphics (which, for the observant, offer clues to the game's story). It's not all natural and life down here in the underwater realm, either. The digital water is more bountiful and diverse than any aquarium, and the chance to swim with all this unseen life feels rare and valuable. The ocean is alive with life, including giant trevally, oceanic whitetip sharks, eagle rays, lionfish, great pulsing jellyfish, and a thousand more species besides. The game's greatest strength is the sense of aesthetic wonder it offers players. Abzû’s soundtrack, both musical and natural, is exemplary. Reach the deepest parts of the sea and the soundtrack retreats, leaving nothing but the deep grumble of the tides, and the low popping of swaying bubbles leaked from the seabed. As you breach the water alongside a display team of dolphins, a choir provides triumphant accompaniment. As you drift into and out of jet streams, through billowing curtains of seaweed, and over old bones licked white by the salt, the violins rise and fall to match your movements. The feeling of enchantment is compounded by Grammy-nominated composer Austin Wintory's stirring soundtrack, which calls to mind Disney's 1940 film Fantasia, which famously blended animated imagery with classical music.
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AdvertisementĪt times Abzû has the ambiance of a magical Disneyland ride, an on-rails tour through vivid scenes where, each time through, you're free to pick out new details and wonders. Like Flower and Journey, two contemplative PlayStation games on which Abzû’s creator Matt Nava has previously worked, this is a game about experience rather than challenge, about the journey rather than the destination. No, this is a wistful, thoughtful kind of a game: a digital sightseeing tour of an underwater realm, which allows you to marvel at the watery vistas and swim eye-to-eye with great whales. At worst you get an electric shock that sends you tumbling through the water for a few seconds until you recover and rediscover your bearings. While, much later, there are dangers in the form of unexploded mines which will go off if you drift too close, it's not possible to die in Abzû. A single button is used to interact with the world, one catch-all interface used to free shoals of fish from meshes of imprisoning fronds, or to send orbiting mechanical devices to cut a window through the coral, or to loose a shark from some collapsed masonry. There's no health bar, no experience points, nor ways to level up your character's abilities. There are, in fact, few objectives at all, at least in the usual video game sense. There's no map, for example, and no blinking mission-marker drawing you toward your next objective.
![abzu video game abzu video game](http://paulsemel.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/Abzu-01.jpg)
But it bucks many other expected contemporary game-design conventions too. This is a fashionably chic independent game, with no ugly and intrusive HUD elements to spoil your view of its watery domain. It takes time to adjust to Abzû in other ways too. Your get-up cannot disguise the fact that your body was not made for a place like this. You play as an adept diver, with strong legs, fat flippers, and a head-mounted torch but, even so, it's hard to shake the sense that you are an interloper in a foreign realm. And then, as a kind of compensation perhaps, you are given the freedom of flight: upwards and downwards you soar in slow-mo, through the teeming fish. The world feels fundamentally different when your movements are slowed and made heavy by water resistance. Links: Steam | PlayStation StoreIt takes a while to adjust to life down here, in the murk and swill of Abzû's underwater palaces. Platform: PC, PlayStation 4 (PS4 reviewed)