Gaming Photography
There is this lovely little gem I stumbled upon a few days ago, a fairly simple indie game with a memorable art style. I play it in short sessions between bigger, more challenging games. It's a turn-based survival strategy with no fighting.
You are a castaway on an alien planet that's mostly covered with an alien ocean.
You have a neat litlle glass sphere equipped with advanced technology, that's your submarine, and you have to dive to survive.
In the intro, your damaged spaceship is falling, and the litlle sphere is expelled like a lifeboat. Soon, you reach a small island and start planning an expedition to reach your spacecraft that has sunken in the deep waters, further from the island.
The gameplay is very relaxing; nothing on the planet can seriously hurt you, but I wouldn't say it's boring. Well, not to me, at least. It's all about exploring the environment, finding ways to turn natural stuff into what you need to survive and keep your see-through submarine going. As you can see in the picture above, the computer inside the sphere will talk to you from time to time in a comic-book style, and assist you, so you won't feel too lonly in this strange aquatic world.
Most importantly, the visuals in the game are detailed and beautiful; there is a lot to enjoy if you love comic books, drawings, and art in general. The visual style is detailed and elegant, which is no wonder, since it is a video game adaptation of the work & style of one of the greatest comic-book artists ever - Jean Giraud, known also by the pseudonym Moebius. Now, Jean Giraud was an amazing artist (He died in 2012) and definitely a comic-book genius. For me, there's nothing more beautiful and exhilarating than the imaginary SyFy worlds he created from the mid 70' to the late 80'.
You'll encounter many interesting animals in your adventure. If you take a good look at all the details in this screenshot, you'll notice a yellow crystal sprouting from the ground near the long-legged creature with a long proboscis. The following picture ...
... reveals that the crystal is actually the top of the tail of a creature that spends most of its time burried in the soil. I mean, sometimes the crystal is just a crystal, but sometimes there is a whole animal attached to it; you never know.
Things you discover get archived in your personal in-game encyclopedia.
For food, you rely mostly on plants. You can collect and consume chunks of meat left by predators, but you can't hunt.
The plants are cool and varied; it's fun to explore them. If you take a good look at the details of the two purple-colored ones with tentacles, in the center of this screenshot, you'll notice a green, foam-like thing in the center of each plant.
The analysis has shown that the green thing is edible, so I used a device that creates waves to shake up the plants.
In this screenshot, you can see the green stuff deposited near the plants. What the preliminary analysis didn't show ...
... is that the green foam can mess up your perception. That's something I discovered after a good vegan lunch.
Some drugs can make reading difficult.
Some underwater plants can equaly good grow on firm land. Here you can see my small garden on the island.
Sometimes the castaway has lucid dreams that try to reveal something about her past or tell her what to do to survive.
The music in the game is a very soothing ambient that suits the setting very well.
Aquamarine is a small but very special game. It's calm, poetic, and very beautiful to look at.
And that's it.
The post ends here - THE END.