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Naiad review: still waters run deep they say, but then these waters aren’t stillI’m going to pour cold water on it
I’m going to pour cold water on it
Image credit:RPS / HiWarp
Image credit:RPS / HiWarp
Yet here’s the cause of my pity. All those other games, with their decisive action, systemic consequence, and neck-snapping: I was playing those to relax, too. Why else would I have snapped all those necks? Being shorn of base pleasures does not make Naiad a restorative oasis amid a desert of stressful video games, and it doesn’t make it more relaxing than its peers. In fact, it makes for an experience that left me restless, even a little anxious, when it made me feel anything at all.
You use these abilities to experiment with the environment. Lead frogs one after another to a congregation of lilypads and your reward is a path of bubbles pointing to a secret tunnel. The tunnel will lead to an area which will further reward you with a sunbeam in which Naiad can grow slightly, an animal power of slight utility, or a short, dull poem. Reunite a scattering of lost ducklings with their seemingly negligent duck parent and you’ll be rewarded with a message at the top of the screen saying thanks.
Image credit:RPS / HiWarp
The interactions between Naiad’s various elements are so shallow and repeated so often that any feeling of play is obliterated. Part of the problem is that your actions are divorced from their consequences. Sometimes hitting a series of flowers within a time limit will cause a rock to break, clearing a path; other times it will cause a human to emerge from a house and flip a switch, opening a gate. Neither makes any literal sense, but it’s also inconsistent in a way that means you can’t reverse engineer solutions. The next time you encounter a closed gate, for example, you’ll need to break a motorboat’s engine to open it.
It’s arbitrary in a way that’s entirely resistant to puzzle solving, and it turns progressing past every obstacle into busywork. Instead of thinking through a problem and coming to a solution, you simply do the only thing available to you in any given situation. If it’s possible to do many things, you do them all, and if you can’t see anything you can do, you do what I did: play the game like a robot vacuum cleaner, going over every patch twice and bumping into every corner.
Do I need to hit those flowers in order to progress? No idea. Do Ineedto hit them at all? Also no idea, because unlike a playground like Untitled Goose Game, Naiad gives you no checklist to steer your focus. Instead its menus only indicate that there are unknown things still to discover, thus producing an anxious fear in me that I might be missing something. This is not very relaxing at all.
Birds such as these flamingoes arrive in response to an egg hatching. It’s pretty magical, until the Steam achievement message pops up. |Image credit:RPS / HiWarp
As I played, I thought a lot about Anne Dillard’s Pilgrim At Tinker Creek, a nonfiction narrative book that has no plot at all, but fills its pages with reams and reams of description of nature.
“At last I knelt on the island’s winter killed grass, lost, dumbstruck, staring at the frog in the creek just four feet away. He was a very small frog with wide, dull eyes,” Dillard writes. “And just as I looked at him, he slowly crumpled and began to sag. The spirit vanished from his eyes as if snuffed. His skin emptied and drooped; his very skull seemed to collapse and settle like a kicked tent. He was shrinking before my eyes like a deflating football. I watched the taut, glistening skin on his shoulders ruck, and rumple, and fall. Soon, part of his skin, formless as a pricked balloon, lay in floating folds like bright scum on top of the water: it was a monstrous and terrifying thing. I gaped bewildered, appalled. An oval shadow hung in the water behind the drained frog; then the shadow glided away. The frog skin bag started to sink.”
Me, looking at a car accident in which someone was evidently hurt: “Ignoring, not learning” |Image credit:RPS / HiWarp
No, I’m here because I lovedAbzu, a similarly gorgeous game about exploring a lush underwater world. I completed each of Abzu’s Journey-like puzzle environments and then lingered just to tinker with the flora and toy with the fauna, or just to enjoy the pure beauty of it. I also, for that matter, loved Journey andA Short Hikeand a dozen other lightly playful relax ‘em ups. I am broadly onboard with games which strip back the verbs available to the player in service of a more contemplative experience. If Naiad were a simple, joyful game about wild swimming, I’d be thrilled.
To come back to what I said at the beginning, part of Naiad’s problem is that, if you’re going to make “relaxing” the most explicit part of your game, then it has to be more relaxing than other kinds of games. Otherwise what’s left? In Naiad’s case, the answer is both too much and not enough.
Enthusiastic is its enthusiasm. |Image credit:RPS / HiWarp
It feels mean to kick out so hard at Naiad in a world already lousy with games that are more explicit, in all meanings of the word, and comparatively barren of games about swimming and duckling rescue. Yet its contrast against other games isn’t enough.
Naiad is, yes, sometimes pleasant. It’s an easy listening, acoustic cover of a song, and some will praise it for having the notes in the right order. Maybe they find that kind of muzak relaxing; for me, it just makes me feel like I’m on hold.
