Cousteausome

Swim (and cry) with the fishes in ABZÛ, a gorgeous adventure from a few of the minds behind Journey and Flower.

This giant squid isn’t the kind who’d take down a ship or duke it out with Moby Dick. Still, it’s huge, roughly three times my length from tip to tentacle. Its pancake eyes look me up and down. I’m getting sized up by an intelligent, curious creature. We swim together, then I do a somersault to signal I’m off. The squid doesn’t care, which is fine. But for a moment, I was with an impressive, abstract being, thinking about what it might be thinking about. I wasn’t concerned about solving puzzles or a health bar or where to go next—only with swimming and seeing and understanding.

Abzû is an expertly directed psychedelic marine tour without a single UI or text prompt telling you where to go or what to do, purely driven by curiosity. You play a nameless diver with an infinite lung capacity, leisurely moving on a linear path from one big underwater environment to the next. You might have to pull a lever and you’re encouraged to steer clear of certain objects later on, but your progress is never gated by puzzles or actual danger.

Swimming feels great. The diver cuts through the water, frictionless and easy to maneuver. One button does a powerful dolphin kick and another performs a somersault in whatever direction you’re pressing. It’s unnecessary, but it’s a flourish that encourages movement for the sake of it. Whether turning a corner in a jetstream or just trying to chain together two consecutive flips to impress the dolphins, throwing a somersault in at the right time is a satisfying way to maintain momentum while looking cool. I wish there were more moves to play with, but swimming and exploring are fun enough as is.

I lingered for a long time, following schools of fish to get a better look, piggybacking a hungry grouper, or trying to keep pace with a manta ray fleet. I reenacted the iconic scene from Free Willy with my orca pals, tried to hug a giant squid, and did a barrel roll on a humpback whale through a torrential cyclone of silvery fish. They dynamically parted around us, spinning off in erratic patterns, and returned to their flashy tornado. It’s one of the most beautiful, bizarre things I’ve done in a game, and it felt like my idea. Feel free to use it.

To really soak-in this world, you can ‘meditate’ on statues in each environment, which let you leave the perspective of the diver and use the camera to select any present organism to follow them around. It’s like bouncing around in a psychedelic marine documentary—all that’s missing is some Attenborough. But in place of narration, the journey is elevated by an amazing score from Austin Wintory.

I emerge from a cave into a bottomless abyssal oceanic trench with almost no visible life but the silhouette of a pod of whales below— the music follows suit, falling from an orchestral swell to nearly imperceptible ambience. It’s never jarring, and merges with the environment into a singular entity—if it sounds sentimental, it is. It works for the music. The story though? Not so much.

I’m bouncing around in a psychedelic marine documentary

Moral reef

It’s simple: a ruined underwater civilization that once lived in harmony with nature lost sight of that relationship and started exploiting the creatures it once worshipped. Technology rolls in, cast as an industrial menace, and does its destructive thing. It’s a tired story for a studio with the same creative director behind Journey.

But when Abzû doesn’t paint silly expositional hieroglyphs on the wall, when it presents me with beauty and behavior and lets my mind go where it will—that’s when I felt most affected. Who knew doing a barrel roll on a humpback whale through a fish tornado would choke me up?

Few games are as curious and beautiful as Abzû. It’s a short, dense journey filled with wonder, and every inch is worth seeing.