ABZU is an underwater walking simulator. You play as a nameless diver and swim through a linear underwater environment towards the end of the game.
Rather than walk, you swim your way through the game. However, there is very little actual gameplay to be had here; there are, in principle, hazards, but in practice, they can’t actually hurt you, just stun you momentarily; they provide no barrier to your progress. There are a few “puzzles” which consist of “follow the power lines/chains from the gate to an object, then press the use key on the object to open the door”. Sometimes, when the game is going *really* crazy, there will be TWO such objects.
What this game really lacks is… much of anything, really. The game doesn’t have any real story to speak of – there is no speech or text inside the game. What little “plot” there is happens entirely within the last three chapters, and isn’t terribly interesting.
Mostly, the game exists so you swim around and look at the stylized fish and whales and other things swimming around you. That’s… really the core of the game, as far as I can tell, trying to look pretty, but it isn’t really anything special in that regard.
The controls are functional but not very good – you can flip your character entirely around while swimming, but you can’t flip your camera entirely around, which makes for some awkwardness. There’s some collectibles, but they’re nothing really interesting, and certainly aren’t challenging, just being “spot the object” throughout the whole game (and if you miss one, good luck figuring out which one – I missed at least one of each on my playthrough of the game, but I certainly can’t be bothered to play through the whole game again to find them). There’s some achievements, but they’re all pretty trivial apart from the collectibles ones.
And… that’s it, really. I left this experience quite bored, despite the fact that the game is under three hours in length, simply because there isn’t anything really to *do* in it but swim around and look at fish while going through a linear experience.
.5