InsaniquariumÄrop a pellet and one of your guppies either eats it and grows, or doesn't and turns belly-up. Then Flow stops being a peaceful interactive screensaver, abruptly becoming a game about the circle of life. Creatures one level over are always visible and as you shift, the outline of a ray three times your size might suddenly stop being a blur and become an orange threat ready to eat you. You're a microscopic wormy creature gobbling up plankton-like blobs: eat a blue one and travel to an ocean plane one shade lighter, eat a red one and travel to a deeper blue. The bit in Spore where you're a single-celled creature working up the food chain was essentially an interactive screensaver, but still one of its best parts. The best underwater games draw inspiration from the life cycles of marine creatures, from what it's like to move through water, from all the dangers and wonders of the ocean. They're not first-person shooters set at the bottom of the sea or games about fish who are also secret agents. If we're going to get wet, it's better when games dedicate themselves entirely to representing the experience of being underwater. Swimming controls usually fill us with dread because they don't get the same care or finesse as everything that surrounds them. Underwater levels in platformers, token diving sections in open-world games-they're usually not great.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |