Note from current Nayeli : I’ve found this draft from 2018. I guess I might as well publish it.
I finally got to play Abzû recently, a game done by Giant Squid Studios who had the director of Journey on board. I fell in love with Journey at the time it came out on the PS3, I had never played something like it before, so I was looking forward on playing Abzû and getting engrossed again. I expected something similar to Journey, what I got felt more like a clone then anything else. Is this bad ? No. The game as still enjoyable. Anyway, let’s dive in my impressions, but first have a trailer to see for yourself what the game looks like. Also, spoilers. This is not a review, this is only an impression-dump on why the game did not stick to well with me.
So, as I said the similarities with Journey are almost staggering. From a narration point of view, this makes somewhat sense, most of those 2-3 hours long games will have the same story structure. Flower has it, the Unfinite Swan has it, and many more. You’ll begin in a new environment which will mostly be quite nice to explore, setting up the mood, the overall tone, lore, whatever is needed. Things start to get slowly downhill, until you reach a shift on tone, the game gets darker, enemies show up, some sort of evil you need to vanquish, and everything ends with a “yay you’ve done it, have a nice feel good part to end it all”. In Journey you will discover the desert, cloth-creatures and the old civilization before encountering your first enemies, and everything climaxes in the beautiful last climb of the mountain. In Flower, you’re happily flying around nature as a petal before the first signs of electricity shows up, the environment getting more darker and gloomy and it you will have the pleasure at the end at reviving a whole city while destroying evil technology. Abzû is the same : you discover beautiful underwater life, an ancient civilization, then triangle shaped miss-used technology shows up, and you end destroying it all, climaxing in a final level where you deliver the ocean of the threat.
The storytelling is actually a bit more complex then this, especially in Journey, but that’s the narration in a nutshell : familiarizing the player with the normal state of the game world, introducing an entity which will disturb the whole, and a happy ending, where everything is great again.
Now, Flower is similar to Journey, but also completely different in many aspects : the mechanics, the environment, etc. It will offer you a different but somewhat similar experience then Journey, whereas Abzû just feels like a not-so-good clone. Not only is the overall narration the same, but it is also stripped from the possible interpretation Journey offered with its main character returning to it’s starting point without giving any explanation, leaving it up to the player to interpret what they just lived through. In Abzû you’re diving, encountering a threat, win over it, and you’re done.
It does not help that the tropes are also the same, replacing the desert with the ocean. An ancient civilization which fucked up with technology, and the player needing to make it right again. Past errors, exploiting living beings (the cloth creatures in Journey, the fish in Abzû), fucking up and having later people fix it for you. Journey had the more philosophical point of view which made this overused trope work, and Abzû don’t. It just felt overused.
The worst Anzû does in my opinion, is copying Journey’s narration to the very core. You don’t have silent cut scenes of exposition, but you will have murals everywhere telling you what happened. Yes, you’re swimming and it’s great, but alas, you will have the same sort of levels, including the sliding ones where the camera while shift to the side, only, Abzû decided to mirror the thing. It still made me feel uneasy, the games seemed more preoccupied to stay close to its predecessor then trying to do its own thing. And by doing so, it actually harms the overall experience.
Like Journey, you will have collectables : shells and meditation statues. Now, in Journey, the collectibles have a purpose : scarf pieces will make you fly longer, murals will give you additional info about the world. The collectibles in Abzû do not. I seeked out the scarf pieces because I loved running and floating around with my huge scarf, I avoided enemies in order to have the world’s most longest piece of clothing at the end of the game. Being hit in Journey was somewhat of a deal, your characters was getting weaker again, the scarf pieces you lost were gone forever. It is already hard to make enemies relevant in those kind of games, and Journey managed to do so. The enemies in Abzû however do not matter. Shells are only collectibles that will show up in a collector-mural. Meditation statue will make you look at the fish swimming around. Relaxing, but nowhere is a feeling of thread. The triangle-shaped evil will only stun you, making you wonder why they are such a thread. Enemies in Journey eat the cloth-creatures, the thread is very real. Triangle-shaped stunny things… only do that. You will only see them in action once where they will kill a shark who tries to kill the big-boss-triangle. If you do not inspect the murals, you overall grasp of the story will be “somewhat dangerous thingies floating around need to be removed, and we did it yay, I guess it kills the fish if they touch them ?”. The collectibles only feel like a “we need to have them in the game, everyone does this” way of thinking, and they are not organically worked into the overall narrative like in Journey.
The gameplay has also been “downgraded”. In Journey you could run around, draw on the sand, fly, fly longer and even longer the more you progress, there was a lot of room of making your own fun beside what the game had to offer. Drawing hearts, and writing “thanks” at the very end of a Journey with a unknown traveler you met online was a unique experience. In Abzû… you only swim. And swim, and always will swim. There is not much interaction going on, no online mode which makes you swim around with other people, your character will not evolve. You can deliver fish from closed ponds, but never will it have the same “hurra moment” then delivering flying cloth-creatures from their prison, because they will actively help you around, fly by you side, make cute noises. Abzû only gives you the satisfaction of discovering a pond and giving the sea some of its inhabitants back. Which, at itself, is still great, don’t get me wrong. But when it tries so hard to be so close to Journey, it feels strange. “Let’s try to be as close as possible to the big brother, but let’s strip away everything that made it work so well” is the sensation I got from the game.
It still is a great game if you like the genre. You will visit gorgeous environments, it’s always funny to see fish eat each other while resting on a mediation statue, the sea is full of wonders, the triangle-things are still somewhat menacing, and the overall narration with the shark works well. The shark was pretty neat, actually. Swimming around whilst holding on a fish was great too. Ever wanted to hold on a blue whale and hop out of the sea ? In Abzû, you can do it. It is just not as engaged and interactive as Journey was, when the game even copies the camera angles from its predecessor, it makes you wonder what they actually wanted to achieve by creating the game. I got it in believing to get a journey-like with its own twist, and I was puzzled to only get a Journey-like. It nevertheless is a decent experience on its own.
Also, on a side note, as someone having chronic pain, holding down R2 in order to swim was a painful experience. That is not a natural hand position to have. Please, you had so many other buttons at disposal you could have used for this.
Nayeli 