ABZÛ

Amount Paid: $1.50

Calling this a game feels wrong. This doesn't have much gameplay. This is an interactive experience and it nails that beautifully. You won't find amazing puzzles or challenging movement, but you will find beautiful scenes and charming creatures. This is not a game but it's an experience I highly recommend for anyone even slightly interested.

Incredibly gorgeous game, super immersive with an amazing atmosphere that's both calming and relaxing as well as purely terrifying at the same time, especially if you have a fear of the deep sea, even without that, whenever I'd have to go deeper into the darkness of the water, I felt my heart sink as well. There are no complex mechanics or challenging components to the game, but it's totally worth playing purely for the satisfying experience, breathtaking visuals, and beautiful soundtrack. It's also pretty short at around 2 hours, maybe double that if you're going for all the achievements, so it doesn't really have time to start feeling boring or a drag to keep playing.
Also, even though the game strongly recommends playing with a controller, if you don't own one or don't want to play with one, the mouse and keyboard controls are perfectly fine, and you should have no issue playing the game without a controller.

So many games boast about having cutting edge graphics. But so few are actually beautiful like this one. Art direction is the key.

ABZU is a wonderful adventure game where you travel in the underwater and free many fishes locked. The story is so beautiful that I always shed a tear at the end of every trip (it's not a lie). The designs are great and the soundtrack is really relaxing and peaceful. I enjoyed playing this game so much, it's one of my favorite game! That would be a shame to miss out such a great game like this one. I highly recommend it!!! 🐠💙

This game perfectly proves that games don't need photorealistic graphics to be stunning, this game beats most of them when it comes to visuals

I've always been enamoured with the ocean.
When I was a child I'd watch the same documentaries about the ocean over and over again, enraptured with the creatures that resided within it. Whether it was sharks, other fish, cephalopods. whales or any other sea creature, I was captivated, unable to avert my gaze. As a natural extension of this one of my favourite places to visit as a child was the aquarium, as it allowed me to come as close as feasibly possible to that environment and those animals with which I was obsessed. Though I have always remained fascinated with the ocean, I had lost much of that childlike wonder and reverence that I had previously held for it.
ABZU, for me, was first and foremost an emotional experience. The game lacks gameplay in a traditional sense, with the game being minimally interactive, yet I don't think any other medium would have been adequately able to convey the same experience. The game's interactivity, its deftly crafted environments, its art direction, its soundtrack, and its story coalesce to create a symphony that is much greater than the sum of its parts. The ocean feels alive, seemingly thousands of different creatures swimming around you at any moment, not only interacting with the player, but all other creatures in the environment. The game's periodic provision of meditative statues really drives this home, with these statues allowing you to focus on a singular creature in the environment, following as it goes about its life, eating, being chased, or playing with others around it. In playing ABZU I felt as if I had been transported back into my childhood, the same feeling of reverence for the ocean re-emerging from a long period of hibernation as I found myself surrounded by an environment that felt real.
Although ABZU is minimalist in its presentation, especially in regard to its story, the game manages to convey a great concern for humanity's impact on the ocean. From what I can tell the story centres around an ancient civilisation that in utilising the ocean's resources rendered much of it barren, with life being unable to propogate and survive. The player character is a product of that civilisation, and throughout the game give's back the life force that had been stolen from the ocean, making these barren areas once again liveable. Since ABZU's release in 2016 the world has become increasingly aware of the disastrous impact our actions have had upon the ocean, with both micro and macroplastics having been found at the deepest known parts of the ocean, insidiously worming their way into everything. Under these circumstances it's easy to be pessimistic, the scale of damage appearing irreversible, however, ABZU's story is one that demonstrates a genuine belief in the possibility to repair things, its thesis appearing to be that it's never too late to fix things, a beautifully optimistic and moving vision for the future.
In playing ABZU I was moved to tears on multiple occasions, its beauty being something few other games have ever come close to matching. Although it is short, ABZU is, to me at least, one of the best games ever made, and I'd highly recommend it to all.

Pretty relaxing game. great visual art style and music. quick and easy completion as well.

Its basically the game Journey but just in the ocean.