Part 1




Part 2

The sea is a very scary place.

The sea in Aquaria is deceptive. You start out in a cave where everything is peaceful and lovely music plays. Your surroundings seem colorful and sweet and innocent. As you leave this safe little environment, you begin to find a few hazards and strange things, but nothing major. But then your character is jarred out of her blissful amnesia as a specter appears and apparently awakens her memory. She then remembers why it was that she retreated to that little cave: everything in the ocean is trying to kill you.

The game becomes progressively more challenging as the story becomes more interesting. Aquaria is serene and surreal and meditative, and it's also a brutally difficult action/adventure game. It does a good job of putting the player in the perspective of one little humanoid fish in a big-wide ocean full of creatures that want to eat you. If you suffer from a xenophobic paranoia of the dark, caliginous, abyssal ocean because of all the ancient, gigantic, tentacled monstrosities that await you in it, you may experience a little anxiety while playing this game. Our rating: 175 sealoafs.

Aquaria is developed by Bit Blot and is available on Steam for PC.

Part 1 covers the intro to the game, where your fish learns whom she is, how to sing, and what to do. Starting in part 2, she lights up the ocean with her shooting ability, and then the real challenge (and horror) starts.