Aquaria Playthrough Diary 3

You mean I could do that the whole time?

More rambling thoughs on my continued adventures in Aquaria. In this exciting instalment, I search the wrong direction again, meet limpets and snails, and gradually become a cold-blooded underwater killer. Also, I met a seahorse!

More beyond the fold...

So I didn't have a whole lot of time today to throw at Aquaria, but I snuck in a good 45 minutes during time I probably should have been asleep. When we last left off, I had decided to go play somewhere else, since I didn't seem to be able to get too much further in the Mithalas chapel.

I wandered around for a while in the open waters and tried different directions. Two moderately frustrating things happened. First off, the direction I chose to explore was more or less a bust. I was looking down, and after finding a lot of environments filled with pretty fish, annoying little ramming-squids in shells, and not a whole lot else, I hit a dead end. Every time I went down further, I hit a message complaining about how dark it was. (And to be fair, it was getting pretty dark.) Ok, so I can't explore here any further either. Great. Not that bad, but since I had just come from another dead-end exploration area, it was a little irking.

(While I really like the feeling of free exploration this game engenders, it is awfully frustrating when all avenues of exploration end up busts, and you have to backtrack. I'll probably expand on this later in a separate post.)

The second frustrating thing was really more of a failure on my part. My inhibitions finally went away. The stupid little ramming fish killed me one too many times, and I started going energy form and incinerating them with my mind. I'm not proud of this, and if they didn't follow you practically forever, I probably would have been content to just avoid them. But they chase you a really long ways, and I finally decided, “them or me, I guess.”

Congradulations, Derek and Alec. You've turned me into an underwater killer.

I was feeling a little annoyed at this point, since I didn't have a clear direction, and was irate that the game seemed to be forcing me to do something I didn't really want to do. (The environments are awesome, and I don't REALLY want to blow up their inhabitants if I can help it, particularly with the creepy energy form.) But then a couple of things happened in rapid succession, and the game is full of awesome again.

First: I met these really annoying little limpet things. This in itself was annoying, (although they were very well realized, and it was very obvious from right away just what they did. Nice design and sound effects.) But then in trying to get them off, I spun the mouse around, and made a whirlpool and flung them off. Then, a few moments later, it dawned on me what I had just done: I'd never done that before at all, but it seemed the natural motion for getting stuck things off of me. I found myself wondering “have I been able to do that all along??” (Answer: yes) Well played, Bit-blot. Well played indeed.

Then, I found a cavern full of sea-snails. Which looked awesome. I find Aquaria to be at its most full-of-wonder when I'm just enountering beautiful undersea things that aren't trying to kill me, and that I can just swim around and enjoy, and interact with. (I discovered I could pull the shell off of a snail. And more amusingly, if I let him climb on a boulder, I could carry the bolder around with him climbing around the edges. Kind of high maintenance for a pet, but fun nonetheless. I named him “Pickles” and enjoyed him for a good 5 minutes before getting bored lugging a giant boulder around for him to climb on.)

And then I found a sea-horse. To be fair, I'd seen a couple of them before. They were red, and floated around near things like save-crystals. I'd feared that they were something I was expected to blow up in order to replenish my supply of meat or something. (Which bothered me since I didn't really want to blow them up.) But then I discovered that the mouse glowed when over them, so I tried interacting with one. Naija went up and sort of hugged it. Great work, Naija. You, er... caught it. Well... done.

It wasn't really clear what next. I didn't seem to be able to carry it home, and I couldn't swim while holding it. I was about to give up, when I happened to try singing. (I was going to see if I could use the binding-song on it to carry it around, or possibly see if I could make a shield big enough for both of us.) What happened instead was that he moved.

This, I have to say, was rather neat. I could direct him around by singing different notes. And he swam a little faster than I usually do, and is a little safer, to boot. But more to the point, it was just downright FUN, swimming through areas on the back of a seahorse.

I also noticed at this point that Naija's song is tuned to work well with the music. Heck, in places, you can even almost sing along, or accompany it. I have to say, that swimming through the lush, beautiful undersea locations on the back of a seahorse, while directing it with music, and trying to make the music accompany the background music, is really one of the neater game experiences I've had in a while. So... Well done, Bit-Blot. That was a rare moment.

I am a big fan of any time the game can make something that both new, while still being intuitive enough that the user can have the joy of figuring it out for themselves without having to break the 4th wall and tell them. So to get not one, but TWO such experiences, in rapid succession (spinning whirlpools, and directing seahorses with my song) was pretty good stuff.

I also found a kelp forest and started exploring it. It had a neat sea-spider thing leaving sticky threads around. Neat mechanic! Also, some leafy sea dragon thing showed up and violently bombarded me with glowing green things. This looks like a neat area, and is hopefully where I'm supposed to go next, since Naija hasn't warned me away from it yet. I'll explore it more tomorrow, but it was great to end on a positive note.

Really enjoying the game at this point, and wishing I didn't have to work in the morning, so I could play it some more...