Abzû is an easy, beautiful and emotional game experience for anyone interested in marine life.

I've been playing video games for many years - most of them involving European fantasy-inspired settings or violent postapocalyptic landscapes.

But as it has slowly dawned upon me that violence is ever-present in the real world too, I have found myself enjoying peaceful escapist alternatives to digitally stabbing bandits and pew-pew'ing aliens and zombies.

The reality is that there's a lot of entertaining game titles that unapologetically hinge on emotionality and pacifism.

But also, science and environmentalism!

The most recent pacifist game I played is Abzû released back in 2016. I've had it encased in its digital wrapping paper in my game library for quite a while, but this week I finally launched into it.

And I can only say that it was well worth the wait, and so I really took my time with it!

Abzû may at first look like a diving simulator (which it definitely isn't!), but is instead a game that thrives on just being beautiful and inspiring. I was initially trying to catalogue it as an exploration game, but from my framework, it is too linear to be defined as such.

And I'm personally happy to not slap a genre tag on to it. Similar to another game Journey from 2012, Abzû features a diver character swimming through several marine environments (and some other settings!) while encountering mysteries and dangers along the way.

The fish shoaling locations are easily one of the most impressive technical features I've seen in a videogame.

The diver is partially accompanied by a handful of artificial drones. Early on, the game briefly makes you think that the drones are your allies while a great white shark encountered repeatedly is a threat... yes, plot twists!

Indeed, Abzû has a story, but you can decide on how much you want to understand of it. The visuals and sounds make it clear what's dangerous versus harmless with the final outcome being quite straightforward to understand.

Note that from here on, there will be spoilers in this post.

The beautiful and richly populated water environments keep coming as the game progresses with more and more incredible representations of marine life.

In fact, the marine life in this game is why I decided to make this post.

The game features dozens of species of organisms swimming all over the place. As someone who has regularly struggled creating 3D models of various animals, I can only respect the monumental achievements in modelling, texturing and animating so many fish (bony, cartilaginous, jawed and even jawless!), mammals, molluscs etc etc! All of these jetting around the place hunting each other and exploring.

Most big games do not dare populating their environments with this much life both due to computational demands and sheer artistic workload, but Abzû makes it look easy!

But the game is also aware of how incredible its environments are, as it has a meditation mode where the player character can rest while you can entertainingly and educationally zoom from critter to critter and study their models and movements. The only information given are their common names, and I appreciated that as I could search for information about them while enjoying the marine audioscape.

I'm not a marine biologist, so much of the first half involved me thinking for many animals: what's this? Does that really exist?

In some of the last levels, you find your aquatic main character to be amphibious as they walk up on land amongst some old ruins seemingly inspired by West Asian architecture. In the waters around these ruins are a plethora of prehistoric animals swimming about the place. I spent 3-4 hours in this setting alone trying to guess many of the species.

It was as if animals from the last 500 million years had been collected and shoved into the same massive aquarium. From trilobites eyeing you from the seafloor, the Devonian barely-able-to-walk lobe-finned fish Tiktaalik zooming past, and to the armoured placoderm Dunkleosteus devouring nearly every other creature around.

And then there's this massive and elegant Elasmosaurus which is likely the most convincing depiction of the animal I have seen in any media!

I hope it sounds like I was excited, because I was. Rarely does a videogame throw an ode to the appreciation and protection of wildlife. Animals are in most video games highly aggressive enemies or defenseless agents to psychopathically kill, but Abzû makes you take a seat as an observer.

While the game was praised at its release, some critics lamented the lack of interactions that one could have with the environment. None of the animals are of any threat to the player character, the apex predator of the show, the previously mentioned great white shark, eventually becomes an ally to the player helping them "win" the game. But there is no way to pick up a live animal or to injure one.

This criticism is interesting because after I played Abzû and other great games where limited interactivity was deliberate, I wonder if this criticism comes from a need to do more with/to wildlife than to just observe it?

I was personally happy to take a modest position and just watch all the underwater hustle and bustle unfold: getting close to smaller organisms or gently latching on to larger ones to explore the environments with them. Being introduced to the different species in Abzû, my summarising sensation was getting an understanding of how much we don't know about our bodies of water on our planet.

Simultaneously, our race for economic growth is causing destruction to these unseen ecosystems through technological expansionism. But the inclusion of extinct marine species resurrected, along with the ending seeing the defeat of destructive exploitative machines, was a reminder of the resilience of life. We're also animals, leaving our mark on the planet, creating suffering and enforcing our dominance. It too can come to an end.

Anyways.

I highly recommend Abzû if you're still considering playing it after these spoilers.

There are no sponsorships on this page and neither the developers nor the distributors know that I exist, so, I'm not putting any purchase/download-links on here.

But I'm sure you can web search your way to a copy.