Aquaria - First Impressions

OK I've played it, probably not for long enough, but I've written up my first impressions here:

http://www.binaryjoy.co.uk/games/games-news/aquaria-first-impressions/

Basically it's a great achievement and well done to the developers, but unfortunately I didn't groove to it. What do you think?

I agree. And my colourblind eyes can't do the singing-to-plants bit.

I thought it was brilliant. Games like this are what I had in mind when I decided I wanted a career in Indie Game Development. Games which are daring, creative and most of all, offer a genuine alternative to the mainstream ( whether that be mainstream retail dross or mainstream portal dross. ) Moreover, it's distinct, it has a personality of it's own. It isn't like 100 other games but with an ocean theme.

I have a long way to go before I produce anything of the quality of Aquaria though.

bought it, love it.

Well something to that effect could be said about bejeweled in it's day. Give it enough time, and success and it will be. Anyway, going to go check it out right now.

wow they messed up there,alienating quite a reasonable % of male players. Perhaps (although unrealistic) each plant should have had a matching symbol on it.

Glad to see we've all got different opinions on it :-)

Its not 'alienation' just put your mouse over each colour untl it shakes, takes 2 seconds. every other song based action is also represented by the shape.

So if you are colourblind it could take max 16 seconds every time you wanted to open one of those things? It's not deliberate alienation but really these days you need to consider stuff like that I think...

no no, you just spin the mouse over all of them, takes like 800 milliseconds to find the right one.

Ah Ok, well that's not so bad. I guess it wasn't obvious enough for Warpy though. Glad you like the game, let us know how you get on :-)

It looks pretty - interesting blend of rpg'ish sort of platformer sort of shootemup sort of Exile kind of gameplay. I too, Grey, thought that even from the movies it seemed like a lot of time had been put into the development of the engine and graphics and this distracted the designers from putting in more interactivity and excitement, as most of the parts you're just sort of swimming and doing nothing else.

No, that's what I did, but it feels like an entirely redundant part of the gameplay.

I think they just ramp up the gameplay too slowly, that's the problem. It actually gets much better after the first hour or two, but probably too many people have wandered off by then. No doubt, they'll address this in a future demo. Well, unless the overall picture is different, I guess.

I thought it was great fun anyway, and just bought it.

I bought it right after finishing the demo.
It's an absolutely stunning game, and as Gabriel has said, really picks up after the first hour.

Very much in the spirit of Castlevania Symphony of the Night.
And oh so beautiful. Everything about it exudes love.

The amount of tender loving care from the developers shows through in every pixel, every musical note.
And the control of your character is sublime.

I agree with Gabriel and they have just got the gameplay going too slowly. I haven't really played it long enough to find out how good it gets, I will complete the demo first and go from there.

How difficult would it be to do a game like this in BlitzMax? Could it be done?

Yeah of course it could be done. I may use that camera zooming trick in my next game.