Aquaria Playthrough Diary 7

So, instead of working on my own projects today like I meant to, I instead spent an awful lot of it playing Aquaria. Read on for my sordid tale of cradle-robbing, cryptography and deicide.


After having gained the nature form, I spent a long time trying to figure out where to go next. I explored all the blank corners on my map, but nothing really opened up. Since I wasn't finding any way forward, and I WAS finding an awful lot of writing on walls, I focused on deciphering it. I found enough samples that I can read it all now, and I'm honestly kind of glad I made the effort. It has a lot of nice flavor. (Paradoxically, I'll be annoyed now if there is some power later that translates it for you. Having made the effort, I don't want it to be invalidated by some freebie from the game designers.)

The writing itself ranges from cryptic (“Does absolution lie above the waves?”) to flavorful (“Mithalas beckons you”) to surreal. (“Rainbow soup, my only escape...”) (After reading the last one, with minimal experimentation, I managed to cook up some rainbow soup of my own. Its effects were... unique.)

Eventually I ended back up in Mithalas chapel, wondering if it was where I was supposed to go next or not. And here I have a complaint. I went to fight the boss, but he was different. He used an attack that I'd never seen him use before. (A suck-me-into-his-mouth thing.) Maybe I just missed it before, whatever. Since I was already assuming I had to feed him bloated fish-men, this seemed like an ideal way to make it work. Yup, he didn't like that. So now he gets really mad and starts shooting tons of beams at me, and refuses to eat any more fish men. I have no clue what to do next. After all of my attacks ping off of him, I get bored and chuck a seed his way, from nature form. BANG, he dies.

What. The. Heck.

Ok, so maybe there was some subtle cue that I was supposed to go back there after learning nature-form. And maybe there was some subtle cue that spiky kelp would kill a giant man-shark? If so, I missed both of them. This boss ended up feeling completely arbitrary, like he only died because I happened to have the right power with me and needed to tap him with it.

Oh well. At least I guessed right about what I'd get from killing him. (A form that could bite, and a way to get past currents that are going the wrong way.) The stealing enemy projectiles is a cute side-effect. And I like being able to eat schools of fish for health now. (I really have very few inhibitions about killing sea life, as long as it isn't with energy-form...

Oh yeah. Speaking of sea-life, I wandered through the energy-temple, now that I knew how to open red flowers to find pearls, and fought a boss-blaster. (That had, what sounded like, a creepy laugh.) And after blowing up the giant mother blaster, who was clearly just defending her young, I stole the egg and raised it as my own, with myself as the only mother the poor, kidnapped blaster would ever know. He's kind of cute. I call him “Blasty”.

Later, I went back to the giant nautilus, and repeated the grisly ritual of matricide followed closely by kidnapping. Although the nautilus (“Naughty”) is not quite as useful, so he gets less face-time.

Perhaps because of the macabre origin, Blasty is a little violent. I try to keep him away from the blue jellies, but he's managed to kill 3 so far when I wasn't on time. Also, Naughty had a funny scene where I was trying to ride some giant fish (under my house) and Naughty ran up and smacked it. It was unexpected and rather amusing. I like to imagine that Naughty was jealous.

As a side note, the Nautilus fight was quite possibly the most fun boss battle I've had yet.

I went up to the area in Mithalas that I couldn't get to before from the current, and here I have to admit, was a wonderful, wonderful moment. I could barely see a ghostly form in the room, but I couldn't seem to interact with him. So instead I went over to the middle of the room, because the window had some writing on it. The camera got all nice and zoomed up, and I slowly translated it. “Mithalas drown unbelievers” it read. Disturbing. I turned to go, and THEN the 3 spectral priests showed up to fight. Freaked me out, since they came just as I had decided there probably wasn't anything else I could do and was about to leave.

Next I wandered over to the veil, and I have to admit, here is one of those rare perfect moments. The water surface effect was exactly what it needed to be, and jumping around out of the water is great fun. The map freaked me out a little at first (so big and open!) but after I realized most of it was air, it was a bit more manageable. I found a few spheres of water floating in the sky, reachable by jumping, (It's fun seeing Naija cross land, creature-from-the-black-lagoon style) and I thought the designers had just said “Screw continuity, this will be fun”, but after later discovering the luminarians, I realized that this was probably in-character for the world. Either way I got a nifty sea-urchin helm to wear.

I also found a nice cave full of turtles (yay!) and a not-so-nice cave with a giant octopus in it, that I still haven't figured out how to beat. (Or even hurt.)

Speaking of the luminarians, I wandered over to the sun-temple next. The first (and main) puzzle nearly defeated me. I wasn't sure I had everything I needed to progress, and having been burned once already, I was a bit skittish. The “slide the thing on the water surface” is a neat puzzle basis, but it wasn't clear at all that the crystal-holder could move, so it took a long time before I tried casting binding on it. (After I realized that, the rest of the puzzle wasn't bad at all.) The boss was a pain, but the creepy writing on the wall in his room was worth it by itself. There seem to be a surprising number of races that got blown up by the creator. Given the text I'm reading on walls, I have a theory what the final boss will be...

Also recovered a nice memory of Naija freaking out some guy on a boat.

Sun-form in hand, I started heading towards the abyss. I took a side trip to the Agnassi ruins (or as I like to call them, the seahorse sanctuary) and was very impressed with their architecture. I also liked the whole racetrack element. I spent the whole time wondering what those crystal turtles did. And then when I finally read out the spell on the rock... LAP 1! Start!

I also found some song on a wall with a picture of a whale, but singing it didn't seem to do anything, either where I was, or later, when I found some baby beluga whales.

Marvelous. I finally got 1:17, but not without a little substance abuse. (Hot soups! Racer's friend!) I also fought some giant crab, but I'm not sure if I cheated. I made him walk over my spiky kelp, and he kept jumping up and down on it, and mashing his vulnerable face against it until he died. It didn't feel as epic as some other boss fights. Got some nice crab armor though. I'm getting all sorts of costumes now. (And tons of toys for my cave, too.)

I wandered through a bit of the abyss, and decided that the glowing things in the depths were extremely well realized here. (Especially the ones that swallow you until you get out somehow.) I took a detour to the ice caves, and the ice veil. After some aerial acrobatics, (that were hard enough to be bordering on “Very frustrating”, I found a giant cave full of water bubbles, complete with a boss.

And that's where I stopped. After several tries to kill him, the best I was able to discover is that I can knock him off the ceiling (he's a giant cave-fisher sort of thing) with spiky kelp. But after that, it's not terribly clear what to do next, and so I called it a night. The bubble cave itself doesn't help matters. It's hard enough to get around that it adds a lot of extra time (at least in my case) to every boss fight, just from reaching him. I realize that the bubbles ARE kind of nifty, but after 5 or 6 times of trying to get to the boss to try to fight him, it got kind of old.

I feel like I must be closing towards the end of the game. I suspect I'll find it (or at least a lot of it) in the abyss, or possibly deeper, since it looks from the map like the abyss map might go further down... More later this week, I imagine.