Unfortunately for “relaxing” games began to cover their players in a healthy fog. These minimal or small experiences set their stall against the orthodox philosophy of video game design focusing on action, rules, progress clearly and often violent. Therefore, it is with Naiad, a swimmer sometimes pleasant to a river you sing to make flowers grow and discover poems by interacting with birds, bees, butterflies and other animals.
However, this is the cause of my pity. All other games, with their decisive actions, systematic consequences and neck appearance: I also played those things to relax. Why am I broken all those necks? Becoming a base hobby does not make Naiad a recovery oasis in the desert of stressful video games, and it does not relax it than its colleagues. In fact, it made an experience that made me restless, even a little worried, when it made me feel anything.
NaIAD is a water spirit of all kinds, babies and introduced to the world with a small cloud, who explains a few existing verbs, most related to swimming. You can push X to push yourself with your feet as a frog (the better to attract frogs to follow you), and press to swim underwater as a fish and ignore floating obstacles like diary. The stranger is singing, in which you hold B to open a note with a throw you can change with the same bar, in Wandersong style.
You use these capabilities to test the environment. First led to a lilypad group and your reward is a bubble road pointing to a secret tunnel. The tunnel will lead to an area that will reward you with a sunlight, in which NaIAD can develop a bit, an animal power of lightweight utilities, or a short, boring poem. Life is a disperse of the duck ducks lost to their seemingly sloppy duck parents and you will be rewarded a message at the top of the screen to say thank you.
These discoveries are actual collectors, and fill in NaIAD’s pause menu in a faint sniffing way of a achievement, but this is “test with environment” according to possible terms. You will quickly learn that almost every area you participate when you flow down has the same frog to attract and the same scattered duck. When the newly introduced flora and animal system, this process does not change. Singing – Note not important – to attract some butterflies for some sparkling branches, and are rewarded with another poem or a nature or a thanks. The birds in the branch? Sing to send them enough on another branch, glow and an egg will hatch. .
The interaction between the various elements of NaIAD is very shallow and repeated that every feeling of playing is wiped out. Part of the problem is that your actions have been divorced with their consequences. Sometimes hitting a series of flowers within the time limit will cause a rock to be broken, clearing the way; Other times, it will cause a person to appear from a house and flip the switch, open a gate. There is no literal meaning, but it is not consistent in the way that means you cannot reverse the engineering solution. For example, the next time you encounter a closed gate, you will need to break the engine of a motorboat to open it.
It was arbitrary in a way that completely resisted the puzzle, and it turned too much to all obstacles into busy work. Instead of thinking through a problem and coming to a solution, you just need to do the only thing available to you in any situation. If you can do many things, you will do everything, and if you can’t see anything you can do, you will do what I did: playing games like robotic vacuum cleaners, going through each patch twice and hitting every corner.
Do I need to beat those flowers to progress? There is no idea. Do me demand To hit them all? There is also no idea, because unlike a playground like a goose game without a title, Naiad provides you with no test list to control your concentration. Instead, its menu only shows that there are unknown things to discover, thus creating an anxiety in me that I may be missing something. This is not very relaxing.
Even controlled by this anxiety, I still miss a few things, as shown by the unprocessed space in the menu. I knew that I wouldn’t come back to find out what those things were, because maybe they only asked me to play more frogs. Those damn frogs, who insisted on all the Lilypad surfaces that I was trying to control them towards. Naiad seems to want you to flow through it at a light or fast speed as you choose, but there is no flow when I am looking for clumsy physical physics around or metaphorical cats. Naiad made me crave for the vague: giving me the hard logic of a non -geometric puzzle and I will slip into the flow state for a few seconds, like I will fall into a warm bath.
Until now, you have seen enough screenshots on this page to know that Naiad is beautiful, at least. It can be best when you let go of the controller completely and after a minute or longer, the camera leaves your main character to display a glimpse of the environment. Each frame is a picture in motion, water and bushes seem to be breathing by wind.
However, we are in the territory of Gris here, about a “terrible, obvious pain”, as Alice wrote about that game. Naiad can be very beautiful, but it is the trivial, old beauty of a landscape picture hanging in the bathroom of a business hotel. It is the kind of beauty that feels, and is not helped by a story and emotional beats that can be predicted.
When I played, I thought a lot about Anne Dillard’s pilgrims at Tinker Creek, a non -fictional storytelling book with no plot at all, but filled its pages with Ream and Ream describing nature.
“I finally knelt on the grass killed in the winter of the island, lost, dumbfounded, stared at the frog in the creek just four steps away. He was a very small frog with wide, dull eyes,” Dillard wrote. “And when I looked at him, he gradually crushed and began to sag. The spirit disappeared from his eyes as if he was inhaled. His skin was empty and drooping; Balloon, lying in the fold like the scum on the water: it was a monstrous and scary thing.
I am not too uncomfortable for Naiad’s frogs that I want to see them consumed as a type of milk shaking by a giant water beetle, but the description of Dillard’s poetry leaves space in it because of the cruelty of nature, and tries to talk about emotions and subjects that are difficult to approach. It revived it more for it. (The rhythm of “Ruck, and Rumple, and Fall” can revive me for days. These waters do not run deep.
The nearest place of Naiad went to talk about anything about anything when people appear. Those great meanings! They are making sad trees by cutting them down and stopping a sleeping bear by making noise to get gemstones in the cave, and you, like Naiad, can prevent them from doing so by singing to attract disrespectful animals towards them, as usual. They also pollute the world through cars and their towns, and nothing you can do about that. This complacent, ethical book book briefly when I wonder if I have Naiad all wrong or not; Perhaps this is a game for children. However, I know that no child still does not see such emotionalism. Once again I think of all the works that have discovered the topics of nature and use it to tell the fable. Tove Jansson’s Moomin books and children who love them perfectly understand that winter will come, the squirrel with a wonderful tail will die, and I will want to turn its tail into clothes.
I am afraid that NaIAD will be widely received by most critics (“lavish.” – 3 stars) and many players, and I want to emphasize that I don’t try to become opposed, as much as I can pretend that I am too bold, too brave to fall into its charm. .
No, I’m here because I love Abzu, a beautiful game similar to exploring a lush underwater world. I have completed each puzzle environment like Abzu’s journey and then linger just to tinker with the flora and toys with the animal system, or just to enjoy its pure beauty. I also, because of that problem, my favorite journey and a short walk and dozens of other gentle relaxing people. I am spacious on board with games that eliminate verbs available for players to serve the experience more. If Naiad is a simple, happy game about wild swimming, I will be very happy.
To return to what I said at first, part of NaIAD’s problem is, if you will make “relax” the most obvious ingredient in your game, it must be more relaxed than other types of games. If not, what left? In the case of NaIAD, the answer is too much and not enough.
The feeling of meaning when kicking NaIAD in a world was worse with clearer games, in all the meanings of this word, and the relatively barren games about rescue swimming and ducklings. However, its contrast to other games is not enough.
Naiad is, yes, sometimes pleasant. It is an easy -to -hear acoustic cover of a song, and some people will praise it for having notes in the correct order. Perhaps they saw the relaxing muzak; For me, it only made me feel like I was holding.
