Aquaria

I keep thinking about how Aquaria was made by exactly two people, Derek Yu and Alec Holowka, over roughly two years, and how that fact is somehow visible in every screen of it. Not in a rough, unpolished way, but in the way a painting carries the texture of a single set of hands. The environments are hand-painted, the world is enormous, and the whole thing radiates the kind of intentionality you only get when a small team is precious about every corridor. Mechanically, Aquaria sits comfortably in the Metroidvania tradition: you play as Naija, an amnesiac aquatic humanoid who explores a non-linear underwater world gated by abilities she gradually unlocks. The twist is that those abilities come through song. Naija uses a circular radial menu to sing notes drawn from the Verse, a magical force that runs through the world around her. Different songs transform her into different forms: the Energy Form fires projectile blasts for combat, another lets her squeeze through barriers she cannot pass in her natural shape, a Beast Form changes the way she moves through open water entirely. There is also a light crafting layer where you combine ingredient drops from defeated enemies into consumable boosts, things like temporary speed increases or healing effects. None of it is complicated, but the form-switching during boss fights creates real pressure, and the later encounters demand faster decisions than the dreamy pacing of the exploration sections would suggest. And the exploration sections are genuinely dreamy. The soundtrack, composed by Holowka, shifts tone as you pass between zones: bioluminescent caverns, kelp forests, sunlit shallows, sunken temple ruins. The score breathes with the geometry in a way that is rare and careful. Naija's story is narrated in voice-over by Jenna Sharpe, and the writing threads personal loss and cosmic mythology together with enough restraint that it earns its quieter emotional moments. The story is told non-linearly through exploration and recoverable memories, with a secret extended ending unlocked by collecting all of them, which lands harder than the standard conclusion. The criticisms that circulated at launch have not aged away. The map system is genuinely frustrating: when you get lost in the later zones, backtracking through visually similar cave corridors without strong directional cues can stall momentum badly. Some critics at the time also noted that the variety of objectives stays thin across the runtime, which runs well past twenty hours for completionists. Controls work best with mouse point-and-click movement, which feels natural for swimming, but switching forms mid-boss with the radial menu can be clumsy under pressure. Controller support helps but is imperfect. None of that changes what Aquaria fundamentally is: a game built with the patience of people who had something to say and the craft to say it slowly. It won the IGF Grand Prize in 2007 and earned it. If you have any warmth for atmospheric Metroidvanias and can make peace with occasional navigational friction, this one repays the investment. The two-person origin story is not a caveat, it is the point.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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