Abzu

My spreadsheet instincts told me to file Abzu under 'not enough mechanics' and move on. Then I actually sat down with it and stayed for the whole run in one session, which tells you something important. Giant Squid's debut is not a game that respects your need for decision trees or build variety. It is, deliberately and confidently, a wordless underwater journey built almost entirely around movement and atmosphere. Director Matt Nava, who served as art director on Journey, brings the same visual language here and pairs it with composer Austin Wintory returning from that same project. The lineage is obvious. Whether that feels like a strength or a weakness depends entirely on what you are buying. The core loop is simple enough to summarize in one sentence: you swim forward, interact with objects using a sonar chirp, release marine life from small craters on the seabed, solve light environmental puzzles to break through barriers, and occasionally ride larger animals by latching onto their backs. The right trigger propels you forward, the left stick steers, and a timed button tap builds a speed boost that lets you breach the surface and catch air. That is the mechanical vocabulary, cover to cover. There are meditation statues scattered through each zone where you can sit and observe the surrounding wildlife at leisure, and the game labels real species names when you focus on them. It is genuinely educational in the quietest possible way. The antagonists are mechanical pyramid structures that harvest blue energy from sea life - the sole source of danger in a game that otherwise has no fail state and no combat system whatsoever. The threat is communicated through color: warm blues and greens mean safety, dark reds and blacks mean you are in trouble. It is elegant visual design doing the work that HUD elements would ruin. Where Abzu earns its 93 percent positive rating on Steam is the audiovisual execution, which is close to flawless for its intent. The orchestral score adapts dynamically to your position and pace, strings swelling when you crest a reef and pulling back to near silence in the ruins. Each zone is visually distinct, escalating from open shallow reefs to deep ancient structures drawn from Sumerian mythology - the word Abzu itself refers to the primordial ocean in Sumerian cosmology. The environmental storytelling rewards attention: murals on ruin walls, the behavior of the great white shark that shadows you (non-hostile, as it turns out), and the gradual restoration of color to depleted zones all carry a loose environmentalist narrative without a single line of dialogue. The third act takes the geometry and atmosphere somewhere genuinely unexpected, and the ending lands harder than the setup suggests it should. The honest criticisms hold up. At two to three hours, this is one of the shorter releases you will encounter. The mechanical variety never really expands beyond what the first fifteen minutes establish. Players who bounced off Journey for being too thin will find nothing here to change their minds, because Abzu is if anything even more committed to minimalism. The camera occasionally clips through geometry in tighter spaces, a small but persistent irritant. Some reviewers have noted the story's interpretation is so open that it tips into vague rather than evocative, which is a fair reading. If you want a puzzle layer, a progression system, or branching outcomes, this is genuinely the wrong purchase. For the right player, though, the length is a feature. Abzu does not overstay its welcome the way many atmospheric games do. It paces its phase changes well enough that the minimalist gameplay never quite goes stale before the scenery shifts again. It is the kind of thing you finish in an evening, put the controller down, and sit quietly for a moment before reaching for the next game in your queue. That specific feeling is rarer than the genre's critics admit, and Giant Squid earns it cleanly here. Approach it as an interactive film score rather than a game with systems to master, and the value proposition becomes much clearer.

Diego · Scout Team

Strategy & simulation

Be the first to comment on Abzu.